Note to readers: Someone in comments below mentioned the widely misunderstood Social Security Trust Fund. I am somewhat a wonk, and have written about such matters. (I realize that issues of aging have limited appeal, which is why I asked the younger Fauxlex aboard, to write about issues with broader appeal.) Rather than rewrite the piece on the Trust Fund, I am simply re-dating it. If all goes according to plan, it should appear below with the original comment thread intact. From 6/26/2018:
The above image is making the rounds on Facebook. Later in this post I will talk about the so-called “Social Security Trust Fund” and how it never was and never will be. For now I want to thank my friend Kevin for putting up his post directly below called A Crashing Success, as it offers an easy and early escape from this post about (cue violin screech) … taxes!!!
Go now, quickly, or prepare to be flooded with the conceptual abstractions that are used to justify the theft of our hard-earned money. The words “hard-earned” are important, as there are other forms of wealth that are easily owned by people who by pure chance slid down the right birth canals – trust funds, stocks and bonds, inherited wealth and Cayman bank accounts. The essential feature of taxation is that hard-earned money is heavily taxed, while the birth-canal funds are only lightly touched, if at all, by the IRS.
So journey with me now beneath the fold, or make your escape. The particular tax I am going to write about has a name you might know, one that sounds like a disease or the claw of a wild beast. It is called … “FICA.” From that word springs the myth of something called a “Trust Fund.”
I had an interesting conversation with a buddy a couple of days ago as we hiked a Colorado trail. He’s a baseball fan, and so am I, him Cubs, me Reds, and we both agreed that the teams we support were not good enough last year to be part of the sign-stealing scandal. I cannot rule that out, however.
I while back I was emailing back and forth with a lady who lives in Cody, Wyoming, business related, and mentioned to her that on a trip to Yellowstone National Park last June our grandson (then age 12) wanted to see a dam. We drove by Boysen Reservoir, and when we got to the head the boy was disappointed that it was an earth-fill dam. Meh. So I made it a point on the way home to make a right turn in Cody and head up the highway to Buffalo Bill Dam, a real one. There was so much snow in the mountains last year that during the winter they had drained the reservoir so that it would not overflow. Even so, last June both floodgates were wide open and an amazing torrent of water was entering the Shoshone River down below.