I haven't hear anyone claim that the US gov doesn't want to pay its debts, and it constitutionally must pay them so it is moot point. I sure wasn't saying that nor was I trying to imply that and was merely pointing out for the uninformed how things are structured and how we got there. There are problems facing the government once the bond redemption starts in earnest and those are mostly ignored which is the other point I was trying to make. The budget is already a mess and Social Security is just going to gradually make a bigger mess but I doubt anyone would know the difference.

I wouldn't say Social Security is properly funded for decades as the date the trust fund runs out is in 2033 according to the last Trustees Report which is the point at which it will be unable to pay full benefits. So less than 2 decades which means you will likely be caught up in it. The point at which it starts to take in less in taxes and interest and begin to draw down the trust fund.

So the decisions that one wants to make is how to deal with the problem and there really are a finite number of solutions. They could:
1. Raise taxes to ensure social security is fully funded. (democrat plan)
2. Decrease the rate at which benefits increase. (Republican plan)
3. Some combination of 1 & 2
4. Ignore the problem and in 2033 just fully fund it out of the general fund. (what will happen from 2017 to 2033)
5. Ignore the problem and in 2033 tell all social security recipients to fuck off and enjoy their 75%. (what the current plan out of the US government is)

I understand that and figured that is what happened, but with such a simple tax form it should have taken 10 minutes to do the audit not a couple of hours.

It is just struck me as a colossal waste of time, especially since all of the info I had, except form 1040EZ, gets sent independently to the IRS as well. Even at that they already had a copy of my 1040EZ because I sent it to them when filing my taxes which is what they were checking so I didn't need to be there. I could understand if they found a problem having me go through the song and dance but this was just wasteful.

Not good enough. I have stated that H-1B employees should be the highest paid people doing work at the company they are performing the work for or are employed by. We are always told that companies can't find a single US worker who has these skills and that they can't train someone up to do the job so these must truly be special people and thus deserving of extraordinarily high compensation. Companies seem to function just fine when a member of the board leaves before a replacement is founds so if these people are so critical they should be compensated better than even the members of the board. I also mean total compensation: wages, bonuses, relocation benefits, medical, stock options, use of corporate transport, vacation, etc.

Make that law and I will believe the companies when they make these statements about a lack of workers or not having the right skillset.

Another idea someone else had was to make it mandatory that for each H-1B a company brings on they have to hire an American to shadow and learn these rare skills from them and eventually take over their job. Again, make this law and I will believe the BS flowing from the corporate talking heads.

Hell if I heard that I would have started looking for a new job immediately and about 10 minutes before tender my 2 week notice I would have forwarded all the info on the issue to US ICE and the FTC and let them open an investigation into the company.

Well this issue is already lumped in with immigration. There was an article back about a week and a half ago about how an amendment to the current immigration bill was going to have a higher cap on H-1B visas of like 195k. So maybe it will get striped or killed, I don't know but one of my senators is one of the ones who has been pushing the higher cap for a while now.

People like AC don't want to save now for the future. Why live with less now so you have more later when it just prevents them from having fun. These are also the same people who would have bought as much house as they could have gotten a loan for just before the crash.

They are republicans they don't believe in evolution.
Now that I have that barb out of the way it is basically applicable to all side but I find it somewhat interesting that in this case we have 2 republicans in support of American jobs and higher pay of American workers while one of the main supporters of expanding the H-1B program is a Democrat from Minnesota.

What you describe is the difference between a statesman and a politician. Sadly we have far too few statesmen.

Burn heretic!

So in general just like every other issue.

To quote the late George Carlin:

If I remember correctly the cuts that were proposed weren't what normal people consider cuts, but were decreases in the rate of increase which in Washington D.C. translates to someone took a chainsaw it. Then I could be remembering it incorrectly but that was a while ago.

The problem is that structurally Social Security and Medicare have problems. Depending on what side of the aisle you are on it is either they have been too generous with benefits or haven't been funded like they needed to be. Either way it is going to be a political mess when the trust fund runs out, but even before that things are going to get painful for the government.

In years when Social Security was running surpluses that extra money went to purchase the bonds for the trust fund so that money went into the general fund to pay for other stuff. Since the trust fund is really just government bonds that will get redeemed from the general fund you are going to see either increased taxation, decreased spending on other programs, or more likely higher deficit spending. When that is gone then the hard decision comes as Social security will only be able to pay out ~75% of the benefits it had been paying out. The government doesn't have a choice in this because the constitution states, in not so few words, that the debts will be paid. At this point the US federal government will either have to directly fund the difference out of the general fund (basically it will be the same amount that was spend on the previous month paying off the last batch of redeemed bonds), or tell the peasants to piss off and accept that they can't pay benefits in full.

...and the other half would be in jail.

While I am not sure about what class you fall into the one time I was audited was my 3rd year in college. The only two deductions I claimed were the standard one and the tuition tax credit and only had one job and was still able to use for 1040EZ. Still I ended up having to take the entire day off from work and school to go up to their office in the Twin Cities (I forget if it is in Minneapolis or St. Paul) to be audited. It isn't like this was a difficult set of taxes like what I have now as it probably took longer to go down to the Mankato post office to get it stamped and mailed than it did to fill out but the audit took a couple of hours. It isn't like they don't already have their own copies of the same documents plus the ones I mailed to them. The whole time I ended up feeling like they were looking to find something I missed or entered wrong which is pretty hard to do when the only pieces of paper are the 1040EZ, a single W-2, and my tuition statement. The auditor would ask questions about each entry, hem and haw, get up to go check things. In general it was a giant waste of everyone's time. I could understand auditing taxes like the ones I have filled out now since it it a byzantine mess with kids, wife who is a teacher, child care, investments (foreign and domestic), some foreign income taxes, retirement savings, property tax, a mortgage, at least 2 W-2s, some 1099 MISC, and what ever else, that ends up with a stack of paper about an inch thick I need to keep for my records that takes 4 hours to fill out even though I am pretty sure I know what I am doing.

After doing my current set of taxes I would welcome a simpler tax code with fewer deductions and rules. What is wrong with a few good brackets (like 5, one for each household quintile), some wildly popular deductions that are used to encourage things society wants (home ownership, education, dependent care), and treating all income the same from an income tax perspective. I'm sure a simplified tax code for businesses could be created as well that still has the encouragements that the current one purports to have while not being so byzantine that investing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in accountants can result in millions or billions of dollars in tax savings.

6 more years of Putin without a shirt.

Hey I am thankful for the Illinois Nazis. Without them there wouldn't have been the important US Supreme Court free speech ruling that made it clear that even offensive speech is protected speech.