Real Action to Reduce Unemployment: Eliminating Minimum Wages and Suspending Payroll Taxes

Americans’ top concerns these days are unemployment, deficits and debt. The rate of unemployment seems stuck at a level economically and ethically unacceptable, and efforts to bring it down appear ineffective and extremely expensive, especially in the context of runaway deficits and debt. It’s time to re-evaluate government policies. A good place to start is minimum-wage laws, with payroll taxes a logical second. Alone, wage floors create more problems than they solve, and all of these unintended consequences are compounded by the extra burden of payroll taxes, which raise employer costs even further while also reducing employee take-home pay.

MINIMUM WAGES In May of 2007, during the Bush ...

National Debt IV: Making Seniors More Secure

Early Record-Keeping for Social Security

On February 18, shortly after submitting a $3.8 trillion budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit for 2010, President Obama officially created the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Co-Chairs of the commission are Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson. “Everything,” President Obama said, “is on the table.” Nothing is apparently out of bounds – not even increasing taxes, tackling and taming entitlements.

Here’s what Mr. Simpson had to say about Social Security: “[Y]ou have two choices with Social Security. You either – you either raise the payroll tax or ...

National Debt Part III: Radical Reform of Social Security

Radical Reform of Social Security requires starting at the root, and that root is its real purpose and goals today, in 2010. What are we really trying to accomplish with this program? What are the basic problems for which we should supply social safety nets, and how do we best supply and sustain them?

2010 is more like the 1935 of Social Security’s birth during the Great Depression than any other time in American history so far. It is a time of Great Recession, when macroeconomic events have created new poverty and exacerbated old. Unemployment has destroyed wage income, and plummeting stock markets have devastated savings from ...

Addressing National Debt by Reforming Social Security

FDR Signing Social Security Act August 14, 1935

Government deficits and debt have reached alarming levels today, and the unfunded liabilities of tomorrow are even more staggering. The key to attaining fiscal sobriety is entitlement reform, and Social Security is as good a place to start as any.

Established in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, Social Security was FDR’s strong response to the difficulties experienced by the elderly, ...