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Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie lays out the case for eliminating the payroll tax, which is currently being used as a $40 campaign gimmick.  Read the full post here.

…Let’s stop the fiction of “payroll taxes” altogether. FICA taxes are sucked out of every dollar of earned income from dollar one through around $110, 100 (starting in 2012); they are split between employer and employee and the total comes to a touch over 15 percent. Ostensibly, these funds go to cover Social Security and Medicare. But that’s not really true in either case. Social Security’s “trust fund” has been raided for a very long time to pay for general government outlays and, more recently, doesn’t provide enough cash to cover day-to-day expenses anyway. The funds collected for Medicare were never intended to cover the full costs of that program and they just keep falling far shorter every day.

Let’s be adult and admit that “payroll taxes” are just another form of income tax; it’s a mental dodge to pretend call them by a different name. If they were named accurately, perhaps it would allow us to discuss spending more accurately too. If we want a payroll tax “holiday,” then why not actually kill the taxes altogether?…