>>However, it will clobber the CEO's making $10 or 20 million, and their employers, who will have to match it.

Bill, Bill Bill. How you do go on. (sic)

The biggest earners minimize their salaries, favoring already lower-taxed dividends, share options and other vehicles that don't attract payroll taxes. People like Warren Buffett who earns less than his secretary, are unaffected. The Ponzi chumps hit by this sort of change are small businesspeople/providers of most new employment/drivers of the economy pulling $250K who don't have access to tricky dicky schemes to minimize their incomes.

Also check out the behavior of US corporations limiting their taxes in multiple jurisdictions by faking head offices in places like Ireland. E.g. Apple has just been slapped by the EU for underpaying $20B in European taxes by positioning a head office in Ireland that doesn't even have any staff. $20B may not be much against the gigantic US deficits that have been allowed to build up, but every billion helps if it's paid at home rather than sending it off on a crazy Rube Goldberg international tax ride.

>>Sorry, but blaming granny, who started working when a day's hospital stay cost $350, for not adequately funding today's insane medical costs, just won't fly.

You'd better google "superannuation Australia" after you google "Clinton Health Plan 1993" to confirm that her goal of universal care was systematically blocked (which was Victor's original contention you objected to.)

According to my math: if in 1993 the US had implemented medicare or pension plans similar to the Australian superannuation scheme as started in 1992, the US fund now would be into the $hundreds of trillions of real assets. Medicare would be self-funding and the banking crisis could have been funded from pocket change. Instead there are huge deficits because your generation failed to pay its share. Nothing complicated about it.