I agree with you, except for an entirely different reason. Why do we tax capital at a lower rate than labor? We complain about lack of jobs, but our economic policies value making money using money more than labor. If I invest money into a business, I get to pay a lower tax rate than if I invest my own hard work into a business.
Flat Tax with NO loopholes.. what's the problem? Everyone treated EXACTLY the same. Who screams the loudest then?
So you've taken the income tax from progressive to flat. What about local and state sales and property taxes? Social Security and Medicare taxes? All of those are regressive. So all you've done is make the rich pay less and the poor pay more of the total share of taxes collected. Again, why isn't that considered class warfare?
a tax system should 1) minimize invasion of privacy 2) minimize social engineering effects (i.e. people making personal decisions based on tax incentives/disincentives) 3) be efficiently collected 4) hard to evade Any tax disincentivizes the behavior being taxed so (2) can't be avoided entirely. Property/wealth taxes discourage saving, income taxes discourage earning, sales taxes discourage spending. I would replace all federal taxes with a 2% sales tax at final point of sale. If regressivity is a concern, give a rebate for the amount of tax up to poverty level spending. So the poor would pay zero net tax (this is the FairTax model). Of course, the left wants taxes to: 1) redistribute wealth 2) create carrots and sticks for social engineering to make people behave the way they want (also to reward friends and punish enemies). That's how you end up with a tax code hundreds of thousands of pages long.
Obama doesn't have anything to do with local or state sale and property taxes already - the ONLY issue he can deal with is federal taxes. A flat federal tax with no loopholes does not 'make the rich pay less and the poor pay more'. There is no such thing as 'total share of taxes collected', because each locale is potentially different. When you have some states which have an income tax on top of federal income taxes, or differing sales tax rates by city or county on top of the state sales tax, etc.. that's an issue for the individual states to take up. Has nothing to do with a federal flat tax. Unless you think that some people, poor or not, should be able to avail themselves of services provided by taxpayers, and yet not pay their 'fair share' for them at ALL.
Yes it does in percentage terms. It makes the tax system even more regressive than it actually is. Further if you take into account the fact that the shortfall/tax cut is largely funded with borrowing, it's warfare on future generations of taxpayers as well who will have to service that debt, future genrations under a regressive tax system. Making the tax system more regressive is "warfare" as much as making it more progressive.
Out of curiosity, would you approve of a federal government which was not allowed to spend more money than it actually collects in taxes? Including service to previous debt?
I don't see the relevance of that to the person being affected. The US currently has a mix of progressive and regressive taxes. If your goal is fairness, only getting rid of the progressive one is stupid. If you don't have any ability to change the other ones, it only makes it even more stupid. Except it does. Any change to make one tax less progressive with no change to other taxes would, by definition, make the rich pay less in relation to the poor.
No because that would be stupid, you'd lock yourself into self reinforcing Depression spirals with each economic downturn, not to mention the self defeating prospect of making profitable investment via ultra low cost borrowing.
So, cutting a budget to be no more than the money collected last year is just a silly idea then? I mean, every citizen is expected to live within their means, I guess it's a preposterous notion to expect the single largest money-taking entity in the history of the world to somehow spend no more than it actually has to spend.. The only reason I ask is because of this weird sort of 'forgone conclusion/assumption' that once some people in office have have stupidly agreed to pay for something they can't afford, that once it is realized that they could not afford it, that the last thing anyone would ever do is say 'You know what? Sorry, but we can't afford those new programs we promised. Maybe we can do a scaled-down version, or maybe it will have to be cut altogether. But we just don't have the money, so, sorry about that, our bad.' Personally, I would like to see the government spend less than half of what it collects, and get rid of the debt asap, and then start filling the coffers with funds instead of IOU's. So that when the day comes we actually NEED those funds, they'll be there, instead of a bunch of Chinese loan sharks with baseball bats and a hunger for kneecaps.
Fiat money, how does it work? here's an explanation: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/01/fiat-money-works.html The government creates dollars. It doesn’t even have to print them. The vast majority of spending is simply done by adding electronic dollars to bank accounts. Therefore, the U.S. government can’t go bankrupt. It pays all its bills in U.S. dollars, of which it is the sole issuer.
i think the top 1% have suffered enough. obama continues his war against the 1%.. essentially turning them into beaten down victims. please pray for these people. they need it in these horrible, uncertain times. #standwiththe1%
No it's not silly - it's downright ignorant of about 4 centuries of the entire history/existence of macroeconomics. Frankly you'd only say something so dumb if you thought extrapolating your own experience sitting around the kitchen table balancin a checkbook made you an expert in monetary and fiscal policy and all of the other things that make up the ability to speak about this subject in a way that makes sense at all. Heh...heh...heh. Anyway yeah it is preposterous. It would get you an F on any university level course to write this.
It is a preposterous notion and let me explain why. When a country faces war, economic issues, infrastructure issues, famine, drought, and a host of other reasons it makes perfectly rational sense to exceed your budget and go into debt to address those issues. Under your proposal, we couldn't fight wars, we couldn't build infrastructure, we wouldn't address recessions and depressions, etc. It has been decades of mismanagement that have us in this situation with the debt. When the economy is strong you're supposed to pay down the debt, not cut taxes and continue to rack up debt as has become en vogue for Republicans the last thirty years.
Proposing cuts to the military? UnAmerican!!!! Besides, we need our jets for the dogfights to come with the Taliban.
