Posted on 07/28/2007 5:37:08 AM PDT by Man50D
What's all the hubub? This will never happen.
The 16th Amendment says ‘income from whatever source derived’. The IRS sees it as ‘revenue from whatever source derived’, There is a difference.
It is a problem in the definition and the abuse of changing the definition.
This is why the Flat Tax will not work. Within a generation or two, the definition will be changed again to cover more activities as ‘income’ and we will have again a monstrous mess.
To understand clearly what the real intent of the 16th Amendment, read the following link starting with the 9th paragraph:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hart/phil.htm
This is a recent article (2006) and it is an eye opener.
Absolutely! Oh; how I love simple, clear, one word answers. Why must so many politicians dance around every policy question terrified of taking a position? Americans don’t demand that a Politician have the exact same position on every issue as they do, just that they know clearly what those positions are before they vote, and confidence that they will not change the moment the Politician gets into office.
All well and good, but what about the 16th Amendment? Without repeal we still have that monster lurking over us and I feel as though the NRST would just become another layer in the federal leviathan.
Yawn...
I could be a CFR member if I wanted to. So could you. It’s not some shadowy exclusive organization.
Here is a serious question:
If the IRS is abolished, what kind of information could we use to verify income for things like mortgage loan applications? If you’re an employee...you wouldn’t need a W2 anymore.
And if you’re self-employed...what do you show?
It’s not AT ALL a knock against the idea, but a question that many haven’t thought to ask.
He has said plenty about globalism, you just haven’t been listening.
“A sovereign nation loses that status if it cannot secure its own borders.” - Fred Thompson.
Irwin's ideas and those of Mr. Hart seem quite similar.
We should remember that conservatism also means slow change. We are gradualists by nature and not at all like the Robespierre types in the French Revolution who went full speed ahead and consequences be da**ed. Why not make orderly progress at a slower pace towards the same goal? We made progress under Reagan and then reverted under Dole's massive 1986 (TEFRA) tax increase when Reagan lacked the stamina to fight any longer. If our theories of economics are correct (as they seem to be) then the continual positive results with continual tax cuts will produce reliable majorities for continued tax cuts and continued positive results.
Justice Now! rhetoric is always attractive but does not usually work much less last.
We are suffering anarchy in what passes for the conservative movement today. I would argue that Reagan's election was the end of the last movement because we foolishly convinced ourselves that his election (a truly wonderful thing) guaranteed permanent conservative ascendancy as it certainly did not.
In the long run, we should settle for nothing less than abolition of all forms of income taxation and ever closer adherence to the constitution on spending as well. It will be a journey of many legislative steps and much persuasion of the public. The problem is that we tax income at all. Let's tax less and less of it with each passing year until the IRS withers away into the dustbin of history.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
What does
Government Intelligence
Jumbo Shrimp and
Fair Tax
have in common?
There will be no Robespierre repeat of history as we still have a Constitution. The Robespierre context is completely different.
As for Irwin Schiff, I saw him in Russo’s film and he seemed to me to have crusaded wrongly, as hardheaded and stubborn. He could have been that way on any subject for all I know.
Regardless of the likability or unlikeability of certain tax protestors, I do feel sympathy for all those that have been cowed and humiliated in our country over the growing tyranny of the ‘Income’ tax. It really does open the eyes to the fact that the USA is not truly a free country.
And it will be no more free in the future as the tax burden increases to intolerable rates due to the age demographic shift.
Emotions aside, the demographics are going to affect us more than greatly, meaning our stability as it currently exists will be bowled over. CBO has known for two decades that an 85% tax rate will be necessary to fund current liabilities. In that sense, the US Government is not unlike General Motors and Ford, both having been downgraded to junk as they cannot cope with the liabilities of their retiree health and pension benefits.
The coming demographic tsunami is now on the horizon and still the candidates, save for undeclared Fred Thompson, refuse to talk about it because it begs a response, none of which is a campaign winner for the current crop of declared candidates.
To win the 2008 election and talk about the fatal demographic shift finally visible to us requires a level of articulation not seen since Ronald Reagan.
But that is a digression, except in pointing out that your ‘Robespierre’ analogy will not be seen in human events but in natural birth and death processes. In a nutshell we have too few people of the right age group; expanding and increasing our senior age demographic made it necessary to double the lower age demographics, and we have fallen far short of that.
A friend of mine joked we should outsource our elderly to Mexico where the living and healthcare costs are lower.
As for your ideas of incrementalism. Look at your own learning to see the failure in that, I mean look at what you wrote:
We should remember that conservatism also means slow change. We are gradualists by nature and not at all like the Robespierre types in the French Revolution who went full speed ahead and consequences be da**ed. Why not make orderly progress at a slower pace towards the same goal? We made progress under Reagan and then reverted under Dole’s massive 1986 (TEFRA) tax increase when Reagan lacked the stamina to fight any longer. If our theories of economics are correct (as they seem to be) then the continual positive results with continual tax cuts will produce reliable majorities for continued tax cuts and continued positive results
By your own admission you confess this is failure. The movement ‘reverted’ as you put it.
As for incrementalism under the FairTax, I am all for it. I already posted that the FairTax system should be tested under legislation allowing for a few states to opt out of the ‘Income’ tax in favor of the FairTax. Once a Commission has reported on the results, I believe all states will be allowed to opt in. And then to make sure the ‘Income’ tax is gone forever, the 16th Amendment must be repealed.
There’s nothing ‘Robespierre’ in that approach.
No it doesn't. The Flat Tax can be filed on a single sheet of paper. The IRS would be downsized drastically.
The Fair Tax will also eliminate loopholes and abolish the IRS.
The Fair Tax won't simultaneously repeal the 16th Amendment though. Sorry, I don't want to pay 2 tiers of taxes. And the IRS will still exist in one form or another. Who's going to collect the money? States and businesses are opposed to the Fair Tax because they don't want to collect money for the Feds and not get reimbursed.
With a low flat tax, the incentive for a black market decreases. Everyone will want to produce and pay their taxes. There wouldn't be any of this avoidance.
Not everyone produces, yet everyone consumes. Fair Tax is a consumption tax, capturing EVERYONE into the tax code.
And it gives EVERYONE a bogus "prebate", including those who won't find work. Pretty soon you're going to have a bunch of people refusing to work and living off of their prebates, and tax revenues will decline.
It is also the only code that does not penalize you for saving. If you don’t spend it, you don’t pay tax on it, therefore you have a much greater incentive to save your money.
However, it will reduce the burden greatly on the upper income ranks, so there will be more money to spend, so I don’t think it will hurt the retail markets at all, will likely help them.
I would gladly pay 25% tax at the register to be done with the IRS and current tax codes. It would be a large break for me, as I am one of the “rich” that keeps getting soaked. I could also control the amount of tax I paid by how much I spent.
(Yes I make a decent income, and no Bill Gates has no competition from me. Solidly stuck in the professional income range and I figure my marginal tax rate is around 50%) And no, I am not in the highest tax bracket.
Some will tell you that you will be paying 30% at the cash register.
For an item that has price today 77 cents (cheap hairpin?), a 23 cents tax will bring the item to $1 expense to you.
23 cents is 23% of $1 (inclusive).
23 cents is 29.9% of 77 cents (exclusive).
But those that try scare tactics using the exclusive rate (~30%) neglect to inform that under the FairTax, the cheap hair pin will cost 59 cents, so the 23% inclusive or 30% exclusive national tax will bring your expense to the same 77 cents.
The FairTax is a replacement tax.
But guess what? If the manufacturer of those cheap hairpins sells outside the USA, they will have no corporate taxes, no burdensome compliance costs so they will be more competitive overseas. Is there going to be a US national tax (NRST) overseas? Of course not!
American manufacturers and exporters are going to boom under the FairTax.
I like the idea of the Fair Tax, especially if it is used in a way that makes legitimate food, rent, and real estate tax free.
I don’t know all of the details, so perhaps someone has an answer to my #1 concern about it. People who have saved money already paid tax on their savings when they earned it. How would the Fair Tax avoid taxing savings twice, particularly for people like my parents, whom are both retired and live off of their savings?
No way in heck will I approve of a 30% tax on everything I have saved.
Where do you see that in the FairTax proposal?
When you take $$$ out of saving and you spend it, are you paying no federal tax on the product or service you purchase? Of course you are paying, you just don’t see it laid out before you.
There are an average 23% of embedded taxes in every product and service.
By spending $$$ taken from savings you are already paying taxes again for an invisible embedded tax.
There is no such thing as tax-free spending unless it for used items, then someone else has already paid the product embedded taxes.
Let me ask you this, would you support a ‘Truth-in-Taxes’ law similar to food nutrition labeling that requires retailers to label or print on a receipt the estimated federal embedded taxes on products sold?
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