Friday, July 04, 2025

All For The Wealthy

The bill doesn't eliminate taxes on Social Security, but rather introduces a temporary deduction that beneficiaries can claim to lower their federal income tax. Notably, that deduction applies to all of a senior's income — not just to Social Security benefits...

What the bill does do is provide a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for seniors aged 65 and older. The tax break is available to people with an adjusted gross incomes of $75,000 or less and $150,000 or less for couples filing jointly. The deduction is set to expire at the end of 2028....

Social Security recipients under 65 and people above the specified income thresholds are ineligible to claim the new tax deduction. It also won't benefit the many low-income seniors who already pay no federal income tax because they earn too little.

"Boosting the amount that you get to write off when you already get to write off everything does not help you at all," Kogan said.

The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan policy research group, said in a June report that exempting Social Security benefits from taxation would not change the after-tax income for the bottom 20% of taxpayers, noting that "those taxpayers are already exempt from taxation on their Social Security benefits."

The biggest beneficiaries of the bill will be higher-income seniors, said Martha Shedden, president and co-founder of the National Association of Registered Social Security Analysts, which focuses on Social Security education.

"The people who benefit by definition have to be richer, and people who benefit the most are the richest people," Kogan added.
“Them that’s got shall get/Them that’s not shall lose/So the Bible says/And it still is news…” "God bless the child who’s got his own.” But the price of eggs! Has he done hearings on this? Taken testimony from witness? Conducted any kind of fact-finding whatsoever? Jared Moskowitz has done more: Can you be anti-Semitic if you don’t know you’re anti-Semitic?

1 comment:

  1. I'm a senior getting taxed on 85% of the Social Security benefits I held off on receiving until age 70. My taxes have been double what they usually are in three of the past four years. Morgan Stanley moved my holdings in mainland China to Singapore and handed the capital gains tax bill to me because I'm an individual and not a bank. It wasn't an institutional fund when I bought it twenty years ago. That happened after Bush tanked the banking system. My income is all withdrawals from investments. My capital gains taxes are all on investments from which I have not taken withdrawals. On paper I'm getting taxed at 12%, but with capital gains I'm spending 30% of 'income' actually withdrawn from investments on income tax. Imagine if I'd had to pay taxes on the eight years of Social Security income I didn't withdraw between age 62 and age 70. I'm being taxed by the government as an incentive to sell funds I've held for twenty years or more to banks willing to buy shares at a rate at which a publicly held company wishes to sell them if they only had shares available for that purpose. I'm saving those shares for when I need to be able to afford assisted living.

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