Alleviating Poverty 65
26. Tamari M., The Challenge of Wealth— A Jewish Perspective on Earning and Spending Money,(Northvale::Jason Aronson, Incorporated, 1995), p. 229.
27. Tamari M., With All Your Possessions, p. 260.
28. For a discussion of what constitutes“basic need” in halakhic sources, see Levine, op. cit, pp. 116-125.
29. Kahaner L., Values, Prosperity and the Talmud— Business Lessons from the Ancient Rabbis(Hoboken : John Wiley and Sons Incorporated, 2003), pp. 68-69.
30. Levine, op. cit., p. 130 notes:“Another reason for the public sector’s involvement in social welfare is that the obligation to relieve the plight of the poor is, according to R. Solomon b. Abraham Adret(Spain, ca. 1235-ca. 1310), not an equal per capita obligation but rather a responsibility proportional to wealth....”
31.“Top Earners Get Social Security Windfall, Others Get the Bill,” Economic Policy Institute, March 9, 2005, at http://www epinet.org/content.cfim/webfeatures_snapshots_20050309.
32. Ibid. The cap amount is also adjusted annually, but the slight increases in the cap do not prevent the average percentage of income subject to Social Security taxes from continuing to decline.
33 Hence, it would seem reasonable to expect that the richest six percent would be greatly advantaged by a capped tax rate for the extended time period while they are paying taxes, followed by a relatively smaller benefit for the more brief time during which they receive benefits.
34. See endnote 24, above.
35. U.S. Department of Labor , National Compensation Survey: Occupational Wages in the United States : July 2004, Bulletin 2576, September 2005, p. 6.
36. To illustrate this in stark terms, a person, A, earning an income of exactly the cap amount throughout his/her working life would receive the maximum capped benefit at retirement. However, a person, B, earning$ 50,000 more than the cap throughout his/her working life would pay exactly the same amounts and receive exactly the same amounts as A. Hence, B’s net effective tax rate would be lower than A’s.