Employers and employees split payroll taxes 50/50 by law. You definitely pay payroll taxes as an employee in the US.

If you are self-employed, you have to manually pay the tax because there's no employer wage to automatically deduct from.

A quick search could have resolved your confusion before commenting nonsense.

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fsckboy 5 hours ago | parent [-]

ah, good correction, that's why the self employed hate them, they have to pay both halves.

the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do.

the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.

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spankalee 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No. The reason that self-employed don't like payroll tax is that they have to pay both sides of it, so it seems like more than they paid as employees.

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bdangubic 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I am self-employed and have been since 2007-ish and while paying "both sides" is the downside, there are soooooo many upsides to being self-employed (especially since the Trump tax sh#t has been enacted and especially if you are setup as S-Corp) that I seriously* do not mind paying both sides at all.*

	▲	fsckboy 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		you probably have a high wage profession, and you max out FICA etc. and stop paying payroll taxes around April every year. You don't like the income uptick at that point cuz you're just so darned happy to pay payroll taxes? There's a line on the form, you could throw in some more. But housekeepers are also self-employed and those taxes fall much more heavily on them. While they are in a lower tax bracket and pay less as a percentage of their income tax, payroll taxes don't work that way (till somebody chimes in to say "no, Portland Oregon is absolutely confiscatory on this score, we practice Bolshevism!" which would be missing the point) I seriously don't mind living in America and paying taxes here but, but when better and more efficient tax regimes are available, or when socialist tax proposals derail local economies, I seriously want to educate people about them.