From MSNBC.com:
As the April 15 tax deadline approaches, two freshmen House members are offering a new version of a hardy tax code perennial: a six-month “holiday” from payroll taxes that they say would benefit both small businesses and the working poor.
Under the bill offered by Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., and Rep. Walt Minnick, D-Idaho, employers and employees of businesses with 50 or fewer workers would pay no Social Security and Medicare taxes for six months. Currently, both employers and employees are required to pay the 6.2 percent Social Security tax and the 1.45 percent Medicare tax throughout the year.
According to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, payroll taxes are a bigger burden than income taxes for more than four out of five tax filers.
Lower-income workers would especially stand to benefit from a suspension of the taxes: according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, more than 60 million tax filers with incomes under $40,000 had tax returns in which their payroll taxes were greater than their income taxes.
A way to help low-income workers?
And according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, more than 45 million tax filers had no income tax liability at all. A payroll tax cut is one of the few ways to reduce such workers’ federal taxes.
The tax holiday proposal would affect about 5 million firms and 34 million workers, according to Bill Rys, the tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, which is backing the idea.
(The federation also backed Schock in his House race last year with a contribution of $2,000 of the total of $2.6 million which Schock raised.)
The payroll tax hiatus has been proposed in past recessions. Joel Slemrod, the director of the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan Business School, says in his book "Taxing Ourselves" that “some Democrats responded to Republican income tax proposals in 2001 and 2003 by advocating temporary cuts in the Social Security payroll tax instead” as a way to help low-income people.
Among those supporting the idea of temporarily suspending the payroll tax in 2003: then-presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.