A foray into stupidity

The Freakonomics blog features the following recent entry entitled "A Foray Into Political Economy." Here it is in its entirety:

On Monday, the Associated Press had an article about how the media are questioning the alleged vagueness of Sen. Obama’s proposal to impose the Social Security FICA tax on earnings above $250,000. (It now stops at $102,000 — the marginal tax rate on each of the wage-earners and their employers is 6.2 percent up to $102,000, and
0 after that.)

I’m not very sympathetic with these concerns, as they are mainly from those critics who object to folks in the top 2 percent of income recipients paying more taxes at a time when, for the past 15 years, their share of income has increased phenomenally. But the proposal could be made more specific: Why not call this extra tax a Social Security Solvency Surtax and have it go into the Social Security trust funds to shore up the program?

It won’t solve the overall problem; unless something more is done, the Social Security retirement program will run out of funds sometime in the 2030’s. (A full solution requires increasing the age of qualifying for full benefits gradually to 70.) But it would postpone the day of reckoning a bit and would add to the overall fairness of the U.S. tax system.

You can read my response here. A much better response can be found here.