Social Security tax holiday | Right Wing Granny

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse reported that unaccompanied children illegally crossing into the United States from Mexico are being given a copy of Kamala Harris’ book, “ Superheroes are Everywhere.”

The article notes:

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh was arrested for using her authorship of a book as a pay-to-play scheme for personal financial gain {Go Deep}. In what appears to be a similar situation, unaccompanied alien children (UAC’s) are being given a book authored by Kamala Harris.

…You can be sure that if Trump books were being purchased with taxpayer funds to be distributed to thousands of people, the leftists would immediately demand an investigation. However, when Kamala Harris does it… crickets.

In an interesting side note: Kamala Harris was in New Hampshire Friday and Jill Biden was in Arizona Friday. Both Arizona and New Hampshire are conducting ballot audits. Interesting coincidence…

I guess using taxpayer money to purchase your books to give away is the new revenue producing scheme used by Democrats. How you classify income from book royalties can also impact your taxes.

On September 29, 2020, I reported:

Joe Biden responded to President Trump’s partial suspension of payroll-tax collections with a statement calling it the “first shot in a new, reckless war on Social Security.” He continued: “Our seniors and millions of Americans with disabilities are under enough stress without Trump putting their hard-earned Social Security benefits in doubt.”

Mr. Biden’s objections might be more persuasive had he and his wife, Jill, not gone out of their way to avoid funding seniors’ entitlement benefits. According to their tax returns, in 2017 and 2018 the Bidens and his wife Jill avoided payroll taxes on nearly $13.3 million in income from book royalties and speaking fees. They did so by classifying the income as S-corporation profits rather than taxable wages.

The Bidens did pay themselves “salaries” from their corporations—CelticCapri Corp. and Giacoppa Corp.—of nearly $750,000 between them over two years, and they paid full taxes on that income. But they circumvented the payroll tax on the nearly 95% of their income that remained. A tax expert interviewed by the Journal in 2019 called the Bidens’ scheme “pretty aggressive”; another told the paper it served solely to avoid the payroll taxes.

Gaming the system is a way of life for our current President and Vice-President.

This article is based on two stories–one from The Hill on Friday and one from Power LIne today. Both stories deal with legislation drafted by House Republicans regarding the F.I.C.A. tax holiday extension requested by the President, the extension of unemployment insurance, and the delay of changes to the Medicare reimbursement rate for doctors. The House Rules Committee has scheduled a hearing on the legislation for Monday. This is the legislation that President Obama says has to be passed before he will go on Christmas vacation.

The problem with the bill, as President Obama and the Democrats see it, is the inclusion of a provision that directs the executive branch to approve the Keystone pipeline within 60 days, or else report the reasons to Congress. The details of the President’s previous actions regarding the Keystone Pipeline are detailed in a rightwinggranny article of November 10. For the President, the pipeline represents a dilemma–unions support it (it will create a huge number of union jobs) and environmentalist oppose it (it produces carbon-based domestic energy–that is not their stated reason, but that is the reason). To act on the pipeline before the November election is going to alienate one of those two groups.

John Hinderaker at Power LIne comments:

But there are a number of other significant provisions in the House bill. It would strip Obamacare of $34.9 billion in implementation funding; extend unemployment benefits while gradually reducing the time for which they can be claimed; delay implementation of the EPA’s new boiler and incinerator regulations; freeze pay for federal employees; and more. Some of the provisions are a little silly, like barring millionaires from receiving unemployment insurance and food stamps. But on the whole it is a good package.

For people trying to shrink government spending and create jobs, it’s a good bill. Politically for the Democrats, it’s a poison pill. Unfortunately this bill does nothing to create peace and harmony in Washington, so prepare to hear a lot of name calling on the Sunday news shows this weekend and in the mainstream media during the coming week.

The article at Power Line concludes:

But there is something more serious going on as well. If the payroll tax holiday extension passes–and both parties are now on record as favoring it–the dam will have been breached, and Social Security will be massively insolvent, not at some point in the future, but today. Many liberals have argued–I think correctly–that this is a decisive step that will probably doom the program in anything like its present form. Inevitably, with revenues grossly inadequate to pay benefits to all retirees, Social Security will be means tested. In other words, it will become a welfare program that provides a safety net to the indigent elderly. Will today’s young workers be willing to pay for forty years into a program from which they anticipate that they will get no benefit when they retire–unless, of course, they are planning on being indigent? No way. The consensus that has sustained Social Security will be broken, and the program will be just as popular as other welfare programs; which is to say, not very popular at all. It will be the beginning of the end of the welfare state as we now know it. (That trend, by the way, is prefigured in another feature of the House Republican bill, which would begin the means testing of Medicare.)

The Democrat Party likes the issue of extending the F.I.C.A tax holiday because if the Republicans oppose it, it looks as if the Republicans support raising taxes on the middle class while protecting ‘the rich.’ The fact that extending the F.I.C.A. tax holiday puts Social Security at greater risk and really does not significantly stimulate the economy does not really enter into the political discussion of the issue.

The root of the problem in passing this bill is not the bill or the additions to the bill–the root of the problem is that there is an election in November of next year. Unfortunately we have a bunch of career politicians on both sides of the aisle who are willing to put their re-election ahead of the good of the country. We need the Keystone Pipeline project to go forward for national security and economic reasons, and we need a middle class tax cut (although not out of the ‘Social Security Fund’, which in reality does not exist). It would be nice to see both sides work together for a change.