{"id":376576,"date":"2010-03-01T16:31:07","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T21:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidkirkpatrick.wordpress.com\/?p=6891"},"modified":"2010-03-01T16:31:07","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T21:31:07","slug":"health-care-reform-won%e2%80%99t-help-self-employed-tax-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/376576","title":{"rendered":"Health care reform won\u2019t help self-employed tax issue"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a self-employed freelance writer, I completely understand the pain of the odd taxes<\/a> and hoops of red tape the IRS has put in front of the self-employed sole proprietor. Too bad none of the reform ideas floating around include helping those smallest of businesses.<\/p>\n

From the link:<\/p>\n

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By a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers who buy their own health insurance essentially pay an extra tax on their premiums. They’re the only taxpayers in the system who pay taxes on premiums, which count as a business expense for corporations and pretax income for employees. Because self-employed workers have no corporate employers to match their payroll tax contributions to Social Security and Medicare, they pay double the rate of wage and salary workers in a levy known as the\u00a0self-employment tax<\/a> equal to 15.3% of their net earnings. That’s on top of regular state and federal income taxes, and the income they spend on health premiums is not exempt.<\/p>\n

The nation’s 9 million self-employed\u2014sole proprietors with few or no employees, contract workers, and freelancers\u2014constitute about 8% of the total U.S. labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The Census Bureau counts 22 million sole-proprietors, but it’s not clear how many of those may be payroll workers as well.) “You correct this, think of the widespread health benefit you would give to so many people,” says Kristie Arslan, executive director of the lobbying group\u00a0National Association for the Self-Employed<\/a> (NASE), which represents the self-employed in Washington.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a self-employed freelance writer, I completely understand the pain of the odd taxes and hoops of red tape the IRS has put in front of the self-employed sole proprietor. Too bad none of the reform ideas floating around include helping those smallest of businesses. From the link: By a quirk in the tax code, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4050,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4050"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}