Larry,

Since your columns seem to be so influential, may I request that you try to get something do about raising the amount of income exempted from the "combined income" calculation required to establish how much of a person or couple's social security retirement is taxed? I'm sure you're aware that these exemption amounts (25000 for single and 32000 for couples) have not been increased in over 30 years. Meanwhile the AMT has had its exemption amounts regularly adjusted upward to reflect the full CPI. I can see the piece on PBS now where they show "Joe" an 80 year old who has had to return to work as a Walmart greeter only to find the effectively 50% of his paycheck now goes to pay taxes on both his earnings and the amount of his social security that has become taxable due to his new earnings effect on his "combined income". A report from The Senior Citizens League suggests that if the federal government had kept the thresholds in-line with the rate of inflation, the exemption threshold for individuals should be $57,107 in 2015 dollars and $73,097 for couples. The impact of this has many implications: income disparity, labor force participation rates, seniors forced to chose between food or medications.
Try doing some work on this and you would really help a lot of people if you could influence a change.
Thanks
Charles Boyd

Some examples of other articles on the subject:
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Social_Security_tax_impact_calculator
http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/fool/article/Care-to-Guess-How-Many...

Hi Charles,

I'll write about this. I feel this is one of the nastiest aspects of the federal tax code. It's one thing to expropriate younger workers as part of the ongoing Ponzi scheme that U.S. fiscal policy constitutes. It's another thing to hide the expropriation by using inflation and brackets that aren't indexed to inflation to do the dirty work.

Please go to www.kotlikoff2016.com and note that under my highly progressive proposed tax reform, Social Security benefit taxation would go away along with the federal income tax.

best, Larry