There have been about 6 sponsors in Congress for the Flat tax. There have been as many as 75 sponsors in Congress for the FairTax.
That’s 75 to 6. The Flat tax has no future because it is not a solution and will fail by weight of the 16th Amendment.
I know the flat tax because I was once a flat tax supporter. But that was before I was aware of how Congress can change tax code using tax authority under the 16th Amendment.
Yes it has been tried 6 times in American history; first at 7% and 1%, and now some fellow named Paul Ryan that Wisconsiners tell us is a young genius is touting a simplfied code of 10% and 25%.
You can try and say that a two tiered income tax is not a flat tax but you will get nowhere past the 6 or so sponsors in Congress with it. The flat tax can and will be amended to tax others at a higher income bracket at a higher rate and then it will grow so that in 10 to 15 years there will be many many brackets, and it won’t be flat anymore.
I’ll say again you can argue semantics but you can’t argue how you’re going to write legislation that prevents a future Congress from changing and amending your Flat tax so that it is no longer flat. You can’t do it because they have the power under the 16th Amendment to change the tax code, to create another bracket for the upper incomes, and so on until years later they have a bracketed ‘flat tax’ just as exists today.
One more time, how are you going to stop a future Congress from changing and passing amendments to create more brackets to your flat tax code?
“One more time, how are you going to stop a future Congress from changing and passing amendments to create more brackets to your flat tax code?”
One last time. I do not have an opinion on what might be. If you had asked me three years ago what my reaction to Obama as President, I would have said, of course, “who?”
Arguments based on what might happen are impossible to resolve ... but you knew that.
We have never had a flat tax.
We should try it.
Saying it won’t work is not an argument or a point. It is simple speculation and opinion based on no history and no good reasoning.
Let me ask you, since you are knowledgeable about this.
Are there any countries that use a flat tax?
How are they doing?