🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4bcgps$4nl@condor.ic.net> johnd@mail.ic.net (John N. Dreystadt) writes:
 :   An even more subtle example of this shows up in the Social Security 
 :   withholding. Supposedly, only half of the tax is paid by the employee and the 
 :   other half by the employer. But as is pointed out above, an employee's wages 
 :   must be covered by their work.

That is  lie.  Employee's wages must be covered by the employer's pocketbook.

 : From the viewpoint of the employer, tax that they pay direct for 
 : Social Security is just as much a cost of the employee as  are wages.

That is EXACTLY right.  Moreover, SO is the cost that "employeEs" allegedly
pay for their own social security.  That money, despite the lie being
told in the relevant window of every paycheck, goes directly from the
employer to the government, so the employeE is NOT paying it.

 :  So most of the cost of the tax is paid by the employee and not by 
 :   the employer.

John Dreystadt, are you a damn liar or just a damn fool?
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?
He may have "earned" it or "produced" it in the sense that his output
was worth that much, but lots of other things besides the employee's
own labor went into his production of that output, so value of his
output is hardly a correct measure of what he has vs. hasn't "earned".
In a market economy, properly constructed, the value of the employee's
labor is its price, is whatever value supply and demand assign to it.

 :  Having it come from the employer just makes people feel better.

That's exactly backwards.  Having payroll-deducted taxes seem to
come from the employeE makes the employeE feel as though HE is somehow
contributing to the tax structure of the nation, and that HE is therefore
entitled to kvetch about how "his" Tax dollars are vs. aren't being
spent.  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.

 :   A more interesting problem shows up in corporate taxes. Who actually pays the 
 :   tax? Does labor get lower wages, or consumers pay higher prices, or owners get 
 :   lower dividends, or some combination? This is still a research topic in 
 :   economics.

Incidence of all taxes generally is a research topic in economics.
Incidence, where the tax ultimately falls, is what ultimately counts,
with respect to all taxes.  But most voters don't even understand
the meaning of the term.  Most pariticipants in this discussion didn't
either, when I re-introduced it.