So Marco Rubio says he won't vote for the compromise bill unless child tax credits are expanded.

I guess that means there's a little drama left, but I'd expect him to be back on board by early next week. Leadership sounded confident that they could appease him.

Yup. It was obvious when all the leadership was complementing him yesterday for holding out that they were going to appease him. I wonder if the whole thing was for show so that they could make “he stood up to his own party for working families” commercials in 2020 or 2024.

I think he's been fairly consistent on this issue...

I know he has during the debate over this particular bill, has this been something he's spoken about before?

FWIW, he makes a good point that people who end up paying zero federal income tax still pay payroll/FICA taxes. It's a shame that this particular attempt at "reform" chose not to address payroll taxes at all.

Yeah. It blows my mind that people aren’t more outraged that the max anyone pays in social security tax is $7886 a year. Maybe people just don’t know it has a cap.

More from tax plan:

Grad student tax issue resolved
Electric vehicle subsidies intact
Teachers buying supplies with own money deduction

So that’s good.

I think a lot of people (if they think anything about SS) think that it functions as a government sponsored retirement account, where they pay money into that program specifically and then that money is waiting for them when they retire. If that's too extreme, I am fairly certain that lots of people don't realize that the government treats federal income tax and payroll tax revenue the same.

If Congress would end the payroll tax and make corresponding revenue neutral adjustments to the income tax rates it would force this discussion out into the opinion. If the goal of Social Security is to make sure we don't have a destitute elderly population why exactly is the tax capped at a relatively low level of income? Why do high income earners receive Social Security at all?

Having a separate payroll tax leads to this idea that "I paid into Social Security, therefore I have a legal claim to that money when I'm 65 1/2" which in fact has no more basis in reality than "I paid federal income taxes and I oppose this meaningless war so I refuse to allow the government to spend my money on war."

(For the record, the former statement would have been true at the outset of the creation of Social Security, but it hasn't been true for decades now.)

If Social Security is a government sponsored retirement account (and not just another tax) why is Congress allowed to spend it, whey aren't they investing all that money?


I think most of your answers to the above lie in the fact that people with significant means are the people that get to make almost all of the significant decisions for the country.

What I meant was, how many people do oI think know that high earners stop paying the social security tax (oasdi) after 127,200? That a person earning a billion pays the same dollar amount as someone earning 127,201? Seems like an obvious fix to SS is to have that tax just keep going like any other income tax, or fold it in as suggested above.

choose wisely

glad i can do math and write code

Humans who write code will soon be mostly obsolete.

don't look at your 401k today

4% haircuts are expensive

this is quite the correction..wow

Ironically, cuts when only 4% of your hair remains costs the normal amount.

Yay for volatility!!!

have fun with that, powell!

As a small business owner with a loan tied to prime, I cringe every time rates go up. Until I get enough equity in the property portion of the loan, I'm out of luck as far as a refi goes. Hopefully in another year or two I'll be there, otherwise the price of sandwiches will be going up accordingly.