"Please write an article telling people with less than $15,000 a year of retirement income how they are supposed to survive." — R.S., by e-mail
Millions of people face this predicament. According to the Social Security Administration, Social Security benefits account for 90 percent of income for four of every 10 unmarried retirees and two of every 10 married couples.
Another report on the Social Security Web site tells us that the average Social Security benefit for a retired worker is now $1,082.30 a month. That's before the Medicare part B premium of $96.40.
The solution here isn't more money
Most of us view the world through dollar glasses. It’s perfectly reasonable. Dollars, after all, are the currency we use in daily life. And the lens, until recently, was distinctly rosy.
When we asked, “How much is that in dollars?” we usually liked the answer.
But it may be time to ask another question: “How much is that in barrels of oil?”
Trust me, others are doing exactly that.
That’s when the world starts to look very different. It also looks more than a little scary. Today, the net worth of the entire country can be purchased for a mere 481 billion barrels of oil. That’s a smidgeon more than the proven reserves of only three Middle Eastern countries,
Taxes are unpleasant and unfair. We all know this. And our friends in government work hard to keep it that way. The only thing about taxes that all Americans can agree on is that someone else should pay them.
Perhaps we can learn something by examining how much we pay in taxes, who pays them, and how our tax payments have changed in the last 20 years or so. We can do this pretty easily, thanks to one of our tax-supported government agencies, the Internal Revenue Service. Every year it examines all the returns that are filed and analyzes changes in the patterns of tax payments. The latest year for which the data is complete is 2005. The basic data is available in the imaginatively titled work, “Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2005.”
