Apart from tax law, employee status carries a host of nondiscrimination laws, pension and benefits laws and wage and hour protections that apply to employees but not to independent contractors.
Other large tax expenditure provisions that I did not include in this experiment include the earned income tax credit, the child credit, the exclusion of employer provided and self-employed health benefits, and the present law treatment of various forms of retirement income and pension plans.
Under current law, a person who this year is 76 years old will receive cash benefits under the national pension system 8.3 times the amount that he paid into the system.