The current weakness in the dollar is caused by a difference in interest rates. People are dumping dollars for Euros and other currencies that have higher yields on deposits. This has been explained ad nauseum in the financial press.
But now Airbus and other Euro concerns are crying foul to the weak dollar, stating that the weak dollar threatens their very existence. Eurozone economic growth is slowing thereby applying pressure for Eurozone banks to cut interest rates. Thus, the dollar will bottom and then rise to a new equilibrium as interest rates stabilize.
The bottom-line is this has little to do with the Income tax or the FairTax. Interest rates and inflation are monetary in nature, and are connected with taxes only insofar that taxes are used to pay interest on national debt and thus take dollars out of circulation.
Simply put, your wandering to a discussion of the dollar is irrelevant.
Your other remarks are shallow and lack depth of understanding. For example, the FairTax will task the States to collect the NRST and deposit it in a federal account. For those states that do not wish to collect or who have trouble collecting in the manner prescribed, the FairTax has a backup collection provision.
The fact that there are vastly fewer points for collection under the FairTax, and the fact that the collection is almost entirely computerized, and the fact that 3,000 large retailers will be collecting more than 50% of federal government revenues leads to an enormous savings in processing revenue collections and in compliance.
Simply put, your wandering to a discussion of the dollar is irrelevant.He wasn't discussing the current value of a dollar - he was discussing the value of a dollar pre-FairTax compared to the value of a dollar after the FairTax and it's very relevant. If a dollar bought a dollar's worth of goods before the FairTax, it would only buy $0.77 worth after. Likewise, a dollar's worth of debt would only be worth $0.77 in real terms after the FairTax.
Agreed.
What a revenue neutral shift from a payroll tax to a sales tax does is put more money into the hands of consumers while making goods cost correspondingly more.
You get more dollars, but each dollar buys less. Since each dollar buys less, each dollar is worse less. You get price inflation, but you don't directly get monetary inflation which is based on the money supply.
However, people are currently dumping dollars because of a decrease in yields of a half point here and there. What do you think would happen if you say you are going to decrease the buying power of the dollar by 20% or so when implementing the the Fair Tax?
Anyone with half a brain and investments in dollars is going to dump them before the Fair Tax goes into effect. That's where monetary inflation comes in, and it would make our current issues look like a tiny hiccup.
I'm not just talking about the Fair Tax. Any major shift from a payroll tax to a consumption tax would have the same effect. The only way to mitigate it would be to do it very slowly over a large number of years, and I don't think anyone trusts our government to do that.
The fact that there are vastly fewer points for collection under the FairTax, and the fact that the collection is almost entirely computerized, and the fact that 3,000 large retailers will be collecting more than 50% of federal government revenues leads to an enormous savings in processing revenue collections and in compliance.
Every retailer and everyone who performs services would be a collector. For the big retailers this is a simple automated process, kind of like payroll taxes already are.
The savings for a collection standpoint are minor at best. The place where you might hope to see real savings are from a bookkeeping perspective. However, the since companies still need to track profits, inventory, and most everything they do now anyway, the savings are once again minimal. Accounting departments not only don't disappear, they don't even see much reduction in workload. They have less tax laws to learn, but complying with tax laws is far less burdensome than everything the need to report to stockholders anyway, and the government is not going to let companies be lax in their bookkeeping just because retail sales aren't involved, because they are still going to be watching for money laundering.
Any cost savings are also offset by the need to implement the prebate system.
It's also a bit disingenuous to only compare the Fair Tax to the current tax system. After all it is being sold as the best replacement. So how about comparing it to a flat personal income tax?
Simple. Easy to comply with. Far less transactions to keep track of.
I also notice how you told me that what I was saying was irrelevant and lacking in understanding, but didn't actually address any of my main points.
What is the main purpose of shifting to a consumption tax, as opposed to other simplified forms of taxation such as a flat tax, if not protectionism?
How are you also planning to avoid the price inflation spike caused by the shift from a payroll tax to a consumption tax?