This poster's proposed solution: replace all US taxation with one single, across the board 100% import tariff.
Supporting datapoint: As of 2009, the monetary value of our imports, was virtually IDENTICAL, to the entire combined tax receipts of the United States government.
Within one single percentage point.
So. Rather than all that money being collected from people who produce, who work, and who succeed. Let's collect the same amount - from those who send our jobs elsewhere.
Via one, single, simple across the board - 100% import tariff on everything imported to the United States of America.
No exceptions. No exemptions. Government completely out of the "picking winners" job.
Eliminate the IRS. Eliminate "progressive" taxation. Eliminate capital gains taxes.
Fund the entire federal government, on one single, global import tariff.
It's how America originally operated, and became the greatest nation in history.
Let's do it again.
Before we cease to exist, as a nation...
Time is short. We need to stop finger-pointing, stop stalling, stop finding "reasons" for the current mess.
And fix it! Let's start making America STRONGER for a change.
This would drive us at warp speed into to catastrophic disastorous depression. Better idea. 18% fair tax. That’s it. Drop all other taxes. Anything/service you buy, you pay 18% tax. But a fair tax will never happen. We have the present tax system. not by chance, but by design. It’s been put in place by our elected gangsters to control us. To keep us under the yoke. The time of fairness and justice came and went. When these theives learned long ago that they could tax us and raid the national treasury, our right to life, liberty and the persuit of happiness went out the window.
Have live in countries that did that. 100% Tariff. For some reason they were always very poor countries.
Even more strange was that when they lowered their tariffs and implemented other reforms their economies began to improve.
Tax the outsourcing of American jobs. How? I dunno, there must be a way. Is it too late? Prolly!
It’s one thing to import underwear made in Vietnam. It’s another to run your business in the U.S. using labor located in India.
Sounds good.
So, let’s say that this works for a few months, until imports stop and people can’t afford to pay twice for imported goods and will be severely limited to what they can only buy here. Then, after there is less competition, and all that Union and high cost labor jacks the price up on most everything, not to mention the already high cost to produce anything in this country, we not only have record unemployment, we have record inflation and shortages of most everything. What’s your solution to that?
And you are dead wrong about how we became the greatest nation on Earth. It did not happen through a 100% import tariff. It happened because at the time, we grew and produced a surplus of goods that we sold around the World, that the rest of the World demanded. Thank God that those other countries did not do back then, what you advocate today. If they had, we would still be a colony under some other export empire.
This has got to be the stupidest idea I’ve ever seen seriously suggested on FR. What better way to send our economy back to the level of the old USSR...except even they had trade partners. If we did this, we wouldn’t have any...except for the natural resources we’d be forced to buy (at double the price, gee what a great idea). So, we’d have manufacturing jobs, but not ad many as we have now because no one would buy our stuff and we’d be a captive market forced to overpay for now crappy goods due to loss of competition...yeah, sounds exactly like the old Soviet Union....