"First, an immediate and significant reduction in the payroll tax will, more than any other proposal, put money in the hands of those who need it and will spend it -- across the entire income spectrum. It will give both employers and employees more cash as quickly as the next payday, thus relieving financial pressures on both. A just-released Congressional Budget Office study notes that a payroll tax cut 'would probably have a large bang for the buck' because it could induce spending and reach families with lower earnings. This action can be taken without undermining the Social Security Trust Fund or the benefits of current and future retirees."

Of course, this does not come from a politician. It comes from a businessman, the Chief Executive Officer of the largest paper company in the country. And it was presented under the need for economic stimulus in a recession. But it was published by the Washington Post, the Beltway bastion of news.

Every American worker should get behind this idea. Write, email, or call your representative and Senators. Hound them. Badger and harass them. Not just once or twice, but many times. Pester them until they cannot afford to ignore voters during an election year. Demand that they take this action. Payroll taxes should be immediately cut at least 16 percent.

The pirates are not going to easily give up the booty they've worked so hard to plunder. Social Security and Medicare surpluses that they have, in the words of ex-senator Moynihan "enjoyed for so many years" and expect "to enjoy for years to come." Your stolen retirement and health care money.

We've had all sorts of spurious plans to reform Social Security ahead of the fictitious baby-boomer threat. Phony plans that would put payroll taxes "on vacation" for a month so the pirates can go right back to their raids—through lock-boxes that never became law or did anything—on to plans that would allow the lowest paid entry level young workers to invest part of their payroll contributions in the stock market. Plans that were nothing but stall tactics and lip service for election results.

The idea of reducing payroll taxes is not a new idea, it's just one of the only two good ideas.

The solution I prefer would invest Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement surpluses properly. Invest them in anything except Treasury securities that can only be redeemed, with interest added, by the American taxpaying public. A form of double taxation I call the "Pay-It-Again, Sam" scam.

But proper and sensible investment is something that we cannot expect from the government. It certainly wouldn't be restricted to buying stocks someone else already owns. Proper investment would probably put Social Security into direct competition with mortgage banking, all banking, and the Federal Reserve itself. Definitely something we could not entrust to a government that has already proven itself untrustworthy.

Is there a lot to invest? How about One Trillion, One Hundred and Seventy Billion over the last 18 years? And that's Social Security alone, now standing at 20 percent of the national debt in a debit black hole account that the pirates want you to believe is a trust fund. Instead of debt, we could have had a reliable supplemental retirement system well on the way to becoming a true and viable pension plan.

Cutting payroll taxes is the easy solution. Probably out of guilt, Daniel Patrick Moynihan himself proposed the idea in 1998. In a speech to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University on March 16, 1998, titled "Social Security Saved," Moynihan not only proposed reducing payroll taxes but took credit for raising them far beyond what Social Security required. According to Moynihan, after serving on the Greenspan Commission to "save" Social Security, he and Bob Dole hatched the plan to raise payroll taxes in the halls of Congress in February 1983. A month after the commission delivered a deadlocked report.

Today, this same man serves as co-chairman of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, a group specifically directed to find ways of allowing younger workers to invest in the stock market. This group's major recommendation is to plunge forward tentatively and take another year to study the situation. More stall.

Nothing meaningful is ever going to happen unless the public pushes and demands proper action. Why should the government give up a slush fund that netted them $98.7 billion in fiscal 2001, with more to come this year despite high unemployment?

Washington Post article