The Payroll Tax Holiday is and has always been a poison pill for Social Security

[TheKentuckian]

34. Refundable tax credit, just like the subsidies in the Wealthcare and Profit Protection Act

Has to be passed but so does this. There isn't anything magic plus your complaint is off base, it isn't like you don't get the Bush Tax cut (that probably also needs to also go away) and the whole fiscal game has been an effort to keep your Bush Tax cut without the ones for the rich and wealthy and the game is stupid. I'd make an exception for the bottom bracket but the rest, including mine needs to go if we aren't going to offset it with much more revenue from the top. I'm lower middle/middle "middle". Mine needs to go and we all need to be paying payroll to properly fund Social Security.

This country is becoming too anti-tax to be viable. We are as a whole anti-tariff, anti-income, anti-payroll, anti-estate, and anti-corporate.

The only tax that has some "bipartisan" support are various sales and VAT type taxes and of course those are the most regressive of all, some states now putting taxes on fucking groceries so that is just conservatives really liberals and poor people rightly don't want that.

The prevailing sentiment is for someone else to pay our taxes, TeaPubliKlans like fee for service and flat taxes to push the load onto the poor and working people based on scale of economy principles and Democrats want the rich and wealthy to pick up the tab but have narrowed the definition to the point that you are talking roughly 1.5% of the population and then only very, very moderately so there is still little increase in revenue.

Now, I understand payroll is flat and therefore a regressive tax but I believe the separate funding mechanism for Social Security and that personal buy in are worth the trade. I am in favor of making more progressive by lifting the cap and accept higher payouts to the well off, rich, and wealthy to do it because with the right payout formula, the program would be strengthened while it would pay them more on a relatively open ended basis (though ever diminishing rate of return as you go up but still a return).

The rate might remain flat at first but eventually we could look at making it more progressive when doing so will not create a funding crisis and can be tolerated politically without endangering the viability of the program which is not now, in my opinion.

Actually, to remain an advanced nation we need a hell of a lot more revenue than anyone is willing to discuss. We have a 5 trillion dollar infrastructure deficit just to bring what we have up to code, we need badly to modernize,
We need to be investing in renewables and energy research to the tune of the arms race, we need to take much better care of our children, veterans, and our elderly, we need to expand primary education to at least the associates level, we need to cover post primary education all the way through, we need to end homelessness forever, we need far more resources for elder care-nursing homes are expensive and we don't truly grasp that it must be paid for systemically as very few can handle the costs with Medicaid spend down acting as the most regressive inheritance tax imaginable, insuring nothing is passed on the poor and working folks.

We have revenue problems and we cannot continue to substitute tax cut schemes for wages, it creates cascade failure and that is our newest game to subsidize the "job creators". First it was substitution of cheap foreign goods killing many jobs and before long opportunities from the big box stores absorbing what was all kinds of small business and leaving shuttered stores and less upward mobility.
Once that ran out of steam the debt spigot was opened up creating a bigger and bigger shoe to drop economy wide.
Of course now that the shoe has fully dropped now our ineffective little tool is drown the government in a bathtub tax cuts.

No, now it is time for taxes and all the political energy being diverted into lifting up labor and doing what is required to increase wages, part of which is much higher top rates that are avoided by costs of doing business.
That is temporary but a necessary bridge because the reality is that there will be less and less need for labor as time goes on. Eventually we must completely remake our economic system. The current one simply cannot be made to work for the benefit of the many in emerging circumstances.

Show me your budget and you show me your priorities. Currently our priorities are insane and unsustainable.