Just Facts Daily

Payroll Tax Burden

Who bears the economic burden of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes paid by businesses?

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The payroll taxes paid by businesses are mainly borne by employees in the form of lower wages. As explained by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (and many other credible sources), “While employees and employers pay equal amounts in social insurance taxes, economists generally agree that employees bear the entire burden of social insurance taxes in the form of reduced wages.” This is evidenced by the fact that workers’ average wages and benefits — including payroll taxes paid by businesses — have increased at roughly the same rate for most of modern U.S. history.

DocumentationTax Burdens Worker Wages & Benefits

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Comparing Inflation

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–MA) claims that President Trump’s “economic agenda” has “failed” and “created” a “mess” because “prices” have risen “by 5.9%.”

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IN FACT, inflation has averaged 1.3 percentage points above the ideal with Trump as president and Republicans in control of congress, which is one-fourth of the 5.2 point overage when Biden was president and Democrats controlled congress. Here are the specifics:

The Federal Reserve and other central banks consider 2% to be the optimal annual inflation rate because this keeps price increases low while guarding against the risk of deflation, which can be very harmful to economies.
The average annual inflation rate during Trump’s second term with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate has been 3.3%, or 1.3 points above optimal.
The average annual inflation rate during Biden’s presidency while Democrats controlled the House and Senate was 7.2%, or 5.2 points above optimal, which is 4 times worse than under Trump and the Republicans.
As inflation escalated during the Democrat trifecta, Democrats repeatedly denied the threat, implications, and reality of inflation.
When inflation continued to soar and reached a peak of 9.0%, Warren, Biden, and other Democrats incessantly blamed it on “grocery chains,” other corporations, “greed” and “price gouging” — even though corporate profit margins had declined and the wholesale prices paid by corporations that Democrats vilified had risen by more than the retail prices they charged consumers.
Further belying Democrats’ claims, a study conducted by 3 Ph.D. economists at the San Francisco Fed analyzed the “inflation surge between early 2021 and mid-2022” and found that “price markups for goods and services” — aka, greed and price gouging — had “not been a main driver” of the inflation, and the root causes were actually “large” federal “fiscal transfers” like “increased unemployment benefits” and Federal Reserve policies like lowering “the federal funds rate target to essentially zero.”
Those big spending and easy money policies were enacted and supported by Democrats.
Trump and many Republicans also played a role in the spending, but Democrats voted for far more of it, and the Covid-19 lockdowns that prompted the spending and low federal funds rates were pushed with misinformation from the left and were stricter and longer in Democrat states.
For a prime example, Warren personally voted for at least five separate bills that became law and added $5 trillion of deficit spending while vocally and repeatedly supporting the lockdowns, calling them “necessary,” and asserting that they were “critical to stop the virus” — an unscientific and deadly assertion.
Warren and Biden also tried blaming the inflation on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even through inflation reached a 40-year high before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine even began.
In his manifesto, Adolph Hitler wrote that “effective propaganda” should exploit the “fact” that the “great masses” have an “enormous” “power of forgetting.”

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