Don Nickles: “I urge my colleagues to just look at the growth in these taxes. The payroll taxes alone have just exploded. If I put in…”

“I urge my colleagues to just look at the growth in these taxes. The payroll taxes alone have just exploded. If I put in the maximum total contribution under payroll taxes, in 1960 that total for Social Security--this includes hospital or Medicare taxes--the maximum tax that anybody put in 1960 was $144. Keep in mind, the system started quite a bit earlier, but the maximum tax was $144. In 1970, the maximum tax was $374. This is just for the employee. The employer has to match this. In 1980, it really increased substantially and went from $374 in 1970 to $1,588 in 1980. Wow, it went up about four, five times. Between 1980 and 1990 it went from $1,588 to almost $4,000--$3,924. Keep in mind, your employer is matching that. So for an individual--that is maximum; in that case somebody was making $135,000, I think--they were paying almost $4,000 and the employer was paying almost $4,000. That is $8,000, a big increase. It continues to explode. By the year 2000, for that person still making $135,000 it goes up to $6,496, almost $6,500, with a total cost of $13,000 put in for a person to pay these Social Security taxes. My point being, this is just a payroll tax. But this tables shows, if you look at it on a curve, that Social Security taxes have gone up tremendously. The same thing for Medicare taxes, they just exploded. Yet, the Medicare fund is still going broke. Yet, Social Security still has a real funding problem.”