[quote=fat_lazy_union_worker]
Anyway, I think some still failed to answer my original post. If he(obama) wants to call this taxing the rich, why is obama leveling this on a household and not imposing this on $125k single incomes?
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I’m going to assume you’re talking about the social security/medicare tax increase here. That tax has always applied to ALL earnings of all individual taxpayers below a certain amount, and will simply now resume on all earnings of all individual taxpayers above a certain amount. It doesn’t discriminate on filing status or number of wage-earners in a family – everyone gets hit. So if you have one earner making 265000, and another making 135000, only the earner making over 250,000 will get hit (i.e. you’ll only pay the tax on the 15K the person making 265K made over 250K). The person making 135K won’t get to the other side of the donut hole, and won’t see any additional tax.
It’s no different than me and my wife. While we jointly make well over the current max tax cap, all of her earnings still take the medicare/ssi hit (since she doesn’t make the cap), and only the part of my earnings that exceed the cap are not taxed. It’d be really nice if hers were immune, but, as I said, it’s an individual payroll tax that cannot be paid jointly.
The other taxes Obama is currently in favor of are, of course, simply letting Bush’s tax breaks lapse on the top bracket, which will affect all three tax brackets, just at different break points based on filing status.
