🚀 go-pugleaf

I continue to rant:
   >ALL of the cost of ALL payroll-deducted taxes is paid by the
   >employEr.  ALL of it.  NONE of that money EVER goes to ANY employeE,
   >so since he never had it in the first place, how can he have paid it?

In article <DKA1LE.4q2@argo.net> gad@argo.net (George Dainis) Replies:
 :   What a bizarre concept!  Under your reasoning, when my employer deposits
 :   my paycheck directly to my bank account, while my bank simultaneously deducts 
 :   my mortgage payment, you would rationalize that I didn't pay my mortgage?

Absolutely not.  Although I must thank you for phrasing that as a question
instead of as a condemnation.  The situations are obviously distinguishable.
Whether you do vs. don't have a mortgage is quite completely under your
control.  You could sell your house.  You could've chosen not to buy it 
in the first place.  But you could not choose not to ratify the 16th amendment,
or the withholding laws of the New Deal, and you cannot, short of precisely
the sort of campaigning we are engaging in here, hope to do anything about
the fact that taxes are withheld from your wages.  You DO have control
over what your bank direct-deposits/deducts.  You do NOT have control over
what your employer pays the government for the privilege of employing you.

   >But American wage-earners DON'T PAY income tax, social security,
   >or ANY other payroll-deducted tax.  Their employers pay them, and they
   >only have to pay them as a penalty for hiring people.

 :   So when I pay social security on my outside income, or when I have to pay 
 :   additional taxes due to under withholding from my primary employer (again, due 
 :   to outside income), I'm suddenly transformed from one state of taxation to 
 :   another?  

Not exactly.  Outside income can be earned in a variety of ways.
This discussion isn't ABOUT outside income.  It's about payroll-
deducted taxes.  Any taxes that you are paying that are not
payroll- deducted may have whatever effects you choose -- that is
just not relevant to the discussion.  We did BEGIN this by arguing
with conservatives who thought there would be more effective
political pressure to lower income taxes if only they weren't
withhold.  I was taking the position that anybody who was in favor
of job-creation (unfortunately not always correlated with claims to
support "the work ethic", conservative inconsistency being what it
is) would have even stronger incentive to get rid of withholding.

If you really want to alleget that it doesn't make any difference whether
your employer pays the gov't now, xor you pay the gov't later, I would
invite you to argue with the people who started this, not with me.
This really has more to do with both employee's and employer's relative
flexibility in changing the terms of the agreement (i.e., the speed with
which your employer can change your wages, how much he knows about your
taxes, and the speed with which you can find "outside income").