The President is advocating cutting the “payroll” tax through the end of the year, possibly permanently.  What he’s leaving out is what this means.  In the US the payroll tax is generally meant to mean two things:  the taxes we pay to fund Social Security and Medicare.  There are two components, the amounts deducted from paychecks and a matching amount paid be employers.  He is saying nothing about how the financing of the programs will be handled in lieu of the tax cut.  His prior tax cut added hundreds of billions of dollars to the annual budget deficit.  Do we really want to remove funding from two critical programs, Social Security and Medicare, that already have financial problems?

#restoredignity