Posted on 09/22/2005 5:04:46 AM PDT by Tribune7
The Fair Tax -- promoted by talk show host Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder (R-Ga.) -- would replace corporate and individual income taxes, payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes and gift taxes with a tax on new goods and services at the point of final purchase. Consumers would get rebates up to the poverty level. A bill, H.R. 25, is pending in Congress to do this. Is this a good idea?
Yes
No
(Excerpt) Read more at zwire.com ...
"With the exception of maybe home sales the fair tax is heads and tails above any other system especially the current unconstitutional system we now have."
The FairTax is way ahead of the current system in creating a home-owner friendly environment, also. The purpose of the home mortgage deduction is so that you can pay the interest portion of your monthly mortgage payment with pre-tax dollars. However, well over half of individual taxpayers do not itemize, so they don't benefit from the home mortgage deduction. Even those who do would be better off if their entire payment were made with pre-tax dollars, not just the interest component.
The rebate checks will be their only real handle on the situation.
This is my problem with the great interest in the "Fair Tax" from the democratic party. The left elitist want a B.I.G. (Basic Income Guarantee) and this is the first step in that plan. (They've yet to figure a way to get checks to everyone.) Pandora's Box, maybe??
"The only upside I see to it is that it would catch all underground economic activities."
There are certainly more upsides to it than that. For example, by eliminating almost all business taxes, US produced goods would be much more competitive on the global market than they are now. With globalization sweeping the planet, that is critical.
Another advantage is that it would address the national savings rate, which is virtually zero right now. Economists are virtually unanimous in their belief that if we don't do something about our savings rate, the longer term repurcussions will not be a pretty thing.
With the FairTax there is no Basic Income Guarantee at all. The prebate serves the specific purpose of helping to relieve the sales tax burden to some degree on low income families ... but they still pay sales tax and at the same rate as Bill Gates.
Attempts to raise the prebate will be recognized as what they really are - which is an attempt to raise tax rates on everyone. If you believe those low on the income scale would prefer to have their tax rates boosted then you've another think coming. They will see it just as almost everyone else will - a raise in tax rates plain and simple ... and it affects everyone.
Some politicians may be that foolish - but not many I'd think.
Another advantage is that it replaces the current payroll based model for collecting Social Security and Medicare revenues with a general sales tax on the entire economy. If we succeed in doubling the economy over the 15 years following FairTax enactment (as Tom Delay has suggested as a goal), then we double the base from which to draw these social safety net revenues. There is simply no way for that to happen if we stick to a payroll base.
I think we need to change taxes to a system where there is no guarantee of set funding every year for anything that isn't critical infrastructure or national defense. If there are shortfalls on the social spending side of the house then it should be up to the people to authorize additional spending much as with bond referendums not their respresentatives. I think the people in this country have more than demonstrated a willingness to help their fellow man above and beyond the charity they are already paying in taxes so its about time we implement a system based upon trust not on threatened loss of property and wealth.
I agree.
The Fair Tax is a bad idea.
Any new tax is a bad idea, because all the government does is add it to the existing list of thievery and take more of our money.
It's costly to administer, brings in more lawyers and accountants, and breeds more lobbyists.
The key to cutting the government's share of our income is good politicians, not new taxes.
We must elect politicians who will stop using our tax dollars to buy votes and instead use 'em for legitimate public goods that benefit us all.
Take New Orleans for example. They spent the money from local, state, and federal taes to build warehouses for the poor and inept, when they might've built levees thick as the Great Wall of China, and tall as the Pyramids of Egypt.
Instead, they're buying votes, and storing the voters in low income housing with food stamps and welfare money. These are not popliticians producting public goods. They are poverty pimps buying vote whores.
Now don't get me wrong. This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with buying votes. It just happens that hundreds of years of racism have left our African brothers and sisters on the bottom of the food chain, and any economist will tell you that their decision is rational, suprememly so.
Look at the underclass in foreign nations without our racial disaster. It's remarkably similar.
If you or I were in that situation, we'd be playing the game as well as we could, too, and advocating it to the neighborhood. Hell, I bet I'd be a pretty good shifty-eyed, poverty-pimp grifter.
So, it's the politicians we need to change. Not taxes.
The government will tax everything it can find, any way.
Our job is to elect politicians who will resist.
Seems you were only right for the first 50 posts (which is still a new record, I think) - check #51.
Any new tax is a bad idea, because all the government does is add it to the existing list of thievery and take more of our money.
Agreed, so lets go back to a somewhat older system of taxation, one based on consumption rather than income.
So, it's the politicians we need to change. Not taxes.
I would think that it has become rather obvious that it is that other guy's politician that needs to change. Least that seems to be the consensus insofar as incumbents getting back into office seem to go.
| "As a matter of fact, what the income tax does — and this is the debate that I think we always try to get into in order to let you and him fight, see — and the people of this country are led down a path where the actual control of their resources, which in the end is the control over their will, is handed off to the government." . . . "The government then manipulates that will in order to destroy the freedom of our electoral system through the income tax structure, and we call the resulting slavery a free system." "In point of fact, it is not as the founders understood, and the only way to restore real freedom is to give people back control over the income that they earn so that they won‘t, at the voting booth and in other phony issues, be subject to that manipulation." |
I vote for removing the income tax system with its deductions, exemptions, and thousand different ways to play political games and favorites in behind the scenes that need to go, regardless of the politicians who are in power at any particular time.
Patrick Henry, Virginia Ratifying Convention June 12, 1788:
There is simply no place is a free society to maintain a tax system know throughout history for is inequities:
- When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
Especially the one tax system that is clearly the favorite among the preferred tools for political manipulation of a democratic society.
There was good reason why Karl Marx and the Communist Party makes the progressive/graduated income tax the 2nd plank of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, published in 1848. We should never forget nor overlook the philosophical underpinnings of that choice:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state ... . Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property ... . These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in he hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. "
It is long past time to remove the income tax from this nation, root and branch. It simply has no place in a free society if one intends to keep it that way.
H.R.25Fair Tax Act of 2005 (Introduced in House)
TITLE I--REPEAL OF THE INCOME TAX, PAYROLL TAXES, AND ESTATE AND GIFT TAXES
TITLE II--SALES TAX ENACTED
TITLE III--OTHER MATTERS
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Great point. In addition, it would encourage reinvestment in inner city(used) housing instead of creating ever expanding suburbs.
Thanks
Thanks
My only problem with it is that it will tax again post-taxed money I have in savings when I try and spend it.
OTOH, the interest will no longer be taxed if you should not spend it.
Actually, I really don't buy the claim that nobody will take a hit in the short term (and that probably is as likely to include me as anyone).
The only people I think who will be burned in the long-term, however, will be lawyers, accountants and tax planners.
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