Government mandated costs of employment

I’ve heard several times from the owners of the business I work at about the costs of employment of people. The amount of money your employer gives you isn’t the total amount that they’re paying to hire you. The added amounts they have to pay actually add up to nearly as much as the gross pay they give you. First, if you look at your paystub, there’s an entry for Social Security. This is actually only half of what you’re having to pay in reality. Your employer also pays the equivalent amount themselves. This comes off of what they would have otherwise been able to pay you. There’s 3 other government mandated programs they have to pay for without showing it on your check. First is Workmans Compensation. It’s an insurance they pay that will give you money if you ever get injured. 

The next two are Federal and State unemployment insurance. These are the interesting ones. When you lose your job, you get something like 66% of your income for 6 months, with you having to beg to get the other 6 months. If you would instead be able to put this in a personal unemployment account, you would be able to draw it down for half to 1/3rd as long as you were employed at the full rate! Say you worked at your job for 3 years, you now have more money from unemployment for as long, without having to prove you’re looking for a job every couple weeks, and without begging for the extension. If you retire, instead of all this money vanishing, it could be pushed over to your retirement fund! This is communism at its worst. From each according to ability, to each according to need… This makes people into beggars at the door of the state and makes them dependent on the whims of government. 

Personally, at the very least we need to expose the full amount of what you’re being paid by your employer and how much of this the government is pulling out for their mandated safety net. If people only knew that they could have 75-85% more money and that over 50% of what their employers give them is taken away for government mandate programs there would be very justified outrage over it…