OLD: Comprehensive Social Security Reform Act (See new thread: Reference Only)

[Lief 🗽]

I echo Senator Happywarrior's comments. I think such a bill is long overdue though.

[Lief 🗽]

Well I finally give this a full read-through, sorry for the time it took. Here are my thoughts, by section:

Section 1: Is it really necessary to create another level of bureaucracy? I feel like most or all of this bill can be handled through the Department of Internal Affairs. I do like the corporatist (in the traditional sense of the word) arrangement/composition of the Council, though I'm a curious how exactly the labor representatives would be elected.

Section 2, 3: This is good.

Section 4: I'm not sure why we need both this and the Atlasian National Healthcare Act? I'm probably missing something.

Section 5: This is all good, and I support the proposed amendment. I didn't understand the 110% thing at first, but after having read your explanation I think it's actually a pretty smart idea.

Section 6: I think we need to cap the number of children (or perhaps the amount paid out per month) in this section. I'm also wary of essentially paying people to reproduce, and I'm afraid that this section may be incentivizing having many children but not necessarily raising them well. Perhaps that is beyond the scope of this legislation.

Section 7: Again, this is really well thought out and covers pretty much every angle of the issue, as far as I can tell. Though we should probably think of some way to grandfather in the social security system; as is, I don't really know what happens to people who've already been working for a while under this system. Would there be a record of each month they were employed?

Section 8, 9: Everything seems to be in order here.

One thing I would suggest is maybe replacing all the increases in payroll tax here. Payroll taxes are probably my least preferred method of taxation, and especially during the recession we're in, I think such a sudden increase in them could be a real drag on employment and hiring. Maybe we could reduce the payroll taxes in this legislation and make some of the income with a small (i.e. 1% or so) wealth tax? We could also do a nationwide sales tax or VAT, as long as it didn't exclude daily essentials (like food and what not).

[Lief 🗽]

So if I'm reading the legislation correctly, this bill would levy taxes as follows: 15% of one's salary, 5% of the payroll paid by employers, 10% of one's other incomes, and an increase in income tax of 5%.

Does that sound like a lot? Does anyone know how much social security payroll taxes currently are? The problem is I'm not really sure how much money a sales tax or a wealth tax would raise versus how much payroll taxes would.

[Lief 🗽]

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's very important that this bill is passed, but as the same time, creating a comprehensive system like this is expensive, and requires raising new tax revenues, something I'm wary of doing while our economy is such a precipitous shape