Did anyone realize that a big chunk of change has been taken out of your 2013 paychecks?
I noticed it immediately and asked several of my peers, but none of them seemed to notice a change. Hello? I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds of dollars missing out of a single paycheck. That’s right. You are not immune. Every single one of you is impacted.
Uncle Sam has gone Jack the Ripper on us and bloody slashed our take-home pay by increasing the social security tax rate from 4.2% to 6.2%.
That’s a mini iPad that I can be purchasing every month, going instead to the dole.
I agree that that’s a pain in the ass (especially when one is unprepared for it – I get paid monthly and haven’t yet entered my husband’s biweekly pay into Quicken, so I haven’t checked the impact on our finances).
That said, I don’t think it’s fair to say that those funds go “to the dole.” I could see that argument if it were unemployment taxes that had been hiked, but social security is, theoretically, money that you will get back later in life. Yes, some argue that those funds will be eaten up by generations before us and we’ll get screwed, but there are efforts being made to avoid that (including tax hikes such as this one).