The proposed VAT (or even a simple national sales tax) would be disastrous because it would ADD a new tax scheme to the already oppressive income tax. The 16th Amendment MUST be repealed before talk of a national sales tax and we should NEVER accept a VAT. Cruz is way off on this one.
So two major substantive problems with Cruz IMO:
1) his avoidance of settling his NBC eligibility status before being nominated so the Dems cannot DQ him and potentially win the general by default.
2) his proposed VAT
Just what we need. More hidden taxes.
OMG
Cruz is OUT.
He has never been a Governor, nor a business man, nor run anything but for office...usual politician, all talk and no show, all he has ever done is political stuff, he has never signed the front of a check in his life...
He sure as hell doesn't understand business. If nothing else, VAT is an administrative nightmare. Canada has a GST tax, so this jerk thinks a VAT is a really cool idea.
I'm fed up with our country being run by morons. And yet, we have another lawyer/politician running who thinks he has a clue; and his supporters who are even more clueless.
Jim, you are wrong. I recently admitted that his tax plan was a VAT, then my brother explained the VAT just as you explained it. Cruz’s plan is not a VAT. It is a business tax, similar to the payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and many other business taxes that companies pay today. With Cruz’s tax plan you eliminate all taxes, and in its place you establish his flat business tax. I think personally his plan my actually lower prices. and that doesn’t even get to part where he helps importers and exporters.
You are WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Ted Cruz says that his tax on the value added by a business is not a VAT! He is proposing a “tax on the value added”, and a VAT is a Value Added Tax! Don’t you see the difference? COME ON! Get with the program!
All business taxes are paid by customers. All attempts to shift taxes to the rich, shift it to business owners, which shifts it right back to customers. Tax the rich, and you pay it yourself when you buy the milk at the store.
For me, the most important thing we can do is to separate IRS from the average citizen. You will always pay taxes. There is no reason, however, that average citizens should have to deal with the annual April 15 madness.
This is something to work toward regardless of who the next president is.
Businesses already collect the tax from their employees and send it on, based on a table. That should be the end of it. Whatever percentage we agree on, fine. The company who is already withholding it, withholds it and sends it in. They deal with IRS (or whatever replaces IRS). The average employee who is not a company should have no contact with them and no responsibility to them.
I’ll admit that I have not read this carefully, and it is a complex topic. But the following excerpt from the article does not seem to make sense:
“Interestingly, Senator Cruz’s business flat tax differs from what most tax wonks call a flat tax, which is a subtraction-method VAT with the labor portion remitted directly by wage earners. Professors Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka developed the concept in the 1980s. Their flat tax is more progressive since the wage tax includes a generous exemption. A still more progressive variant, which the late David Bradford called the X-tax, includes progressive rates rather than a single-rate flat rate.
They are all variations on the same theme. But they are all VATs.”
So the Flat tax on income was a VAT? I don’t think so. It seems that every tax is a VAT in the eyes of Len Burman.
Regarding Cruz’s flat tax, I have a couple of questions. First, what happened to Cruz’s constitutionally indefensible promise to abolish the IRS? Does he intend for his flat tax to take the place of the IRS?
Note that a president cannot abolish the IRS without the consent of Congress. And I think that Congress likes the IRS. After all, corrupt lawmakers can keep their voting records clean by allowing the IRS to make unpopular tax regulations for them.
Next, what was Cruz indoctrinated with in Harvard Law School? His flat tax proposal indicates that it certainly wasn’t the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers as the Founding States had intended for those powers to be understood.
From a related thread …
More specifically, a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified that Congress is prohibited from appropriating taxes in the name of state power issues, basically any issue which Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Also note that the example taxes given in the OP deal with INTRAstate commerce. But despite what FDR’s state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices wanted everybody to believe about Congresss’s Commerce Clause powers (1.8.3), a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had also clarified that the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution the specific power to regulate intrastate commerce.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
I don’t think that Cruz understands that one of the very few domestic federal spending programs that the states have actually delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate, tax and spend for is the U.S. Mail Service (1.8.7). Most other federal domestic spending programs are based on 10th Amendment-protected state powers and state revenues which the feds have stolen from the states by means of unconstitutional House appropriations bills.
In fact, based on the Court’s statements above, here is a rough approximation of how much taxpayers should be paying Congress annually to perform its Section 8-limited power duties.
Given that the plurality of clauses in Section 8 deal with defense, and given that the Department of Defense budget for 2015 was $500+ billion, I will generously round up the $500+ billion figure to $1 trillion (but probably much less) as the annual price tag of the federal government to the taxpayers.
In other words, the corrupt media, including Obama guard dog Fx News, should not be reporting multi-trillion dollar annual federal budgets without mentioning the Supreme Court’s clarification of Congress’s limited power to appropriate taxes in budget discussions.
Remember in November!
When patriots elect Trump, or whatever conservative they elect, they need to also elect a new, state sovereignty-respecting Congress that will not only work within its Section 8-limited powers to support the new president, but also put a stop to unconstitutional federal taxes.
Also consider that such a Congress would probably be willing to fire state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices.
It is not a VAT. It is a business tax to replace the corporate and FICA taxes.
How about this approach. Have only one tax that is initiated at the local level. What is left after local use goes to the state & federal. That’s it. Why send money to the feds to filter back down to the states & finally the local level where it actually accomplishes something? The total funds would only need to change hands once at each level. So,maybe there isn’t much left for the feds....would this be a bad thing?