OT - US Federal Tax Data for the 0.1%

I look at the payroll tax as an investment. I've got most of it back in the first 5 years of retirement. I think I'm making about 25% on my payroll tax investment.

-Bill

Which only means that you're stealing money from someone else.

me data for the US. I came upon some very detailed data today, so here it is. The data comes from the US Internal Revenue Service.

payroll taxes I pay (and the equal share that my employer pays 'in my name '.) which adds something like 14-15% to everyone making less than ~$100k/ yr.

the first 5 years of retirement. I think I'm making about 25% on my payroll tax investment.

Probably not. For one thing, he's collecting not only on his own investment , but also on the extra money his employer put in. And retirement payments are funded as annuities which only have to pay out over a finite time - eit her the life of the payee or the lives of the payee and their surviving spo use. They pay off better than funds that conserve the value of the equity.

And they'll go bust if better medicine starts making us live significantly longer. Maybe that's why life expectancy in the US is a couple of years sho rter than it is in other advanced industrial countries ...

You really are an idiot. You know nothing about how SS works (or anything else).

They'll go bust if nothing happens. It happened long ago.

Learn how to use a real newsreader, Slowman. You Google groupies really f*ck up the Usenet.

pay big bucks for their "silver bullets". There are now charities who work on cures for diseases of the poor, but they don't have the same resources ...

I'm not convinced that is a fair statement. Frontline ran a story a while back about how big pharma was slashing R&D on new antibiotics to combat Gram-negative bacteria. As a result, there are now several bacterial infections that are "pan-resistant".

You would think a rich man with a nasty bug in his system would pay ENORMOU S sums for an antibiotic that would save his life. But it turns out that s hareholders get a bigger return on drugs that don't wear out due to overuse . Used to excess, antibiotics wind up creating resistance over time in the organisms they are designed to kill. You can sell a diabetes pill forever .

The problem is economic. It takes about a billion dollars to develop and get a new drug approved, with lots of failures, and no antibiotic can make enough money to repay the billion. People use a front-line antibiotic for two weeks a few times per lifetime, on average. So, very little research is done outside of academic institutions.

The problem in the US is that the FDA is extremely risk-averse, because they know from long experience that Congress will roast the FDA if it approves the wrong drug, but will do nothing much if the approval process is cripplingly heavy. So, it is.

If I were King, I would have the FDA only require that the companies pay (via the FDA) for reasonable trials to be run by and often at various academic centers, and publish the results whatever the outcome, and let the medical community decide if the risk benefit ratio was attractive enough. The FDA would not be responsible for judging safety or efficacy - doctors would collectively make that decision.

Joe Gwinn