Dean's tax plan is a recipe for defeat, pure and simple. The Bush tax cuts account for only about 25% of the current deficit, and that requires one to accept that the economy would be at the same level without them. In truth, they may well have paid for themselves by staving off a more serious recession. The deficit is the result of 9/11, war, a recession and an out of control budget. Bush is responsible for some but not all of this. I'm surprised that a guy as smart as Dean would fall so quickly into the tax trap. He could have made himself a credible candidate by appealing to the majority of voters who own stocks and the sizeable small business community. Instead he goes straight for left wing tax hikes, a proven voter turn-off. I guess you have to gtive him credit for being honest though. Clinton promised a middle class tax cut and instead enacted pretty much what Dean is proposing. He did get elected though. The thing I find kind of frightening is that Dean does have an opening to win the election. Bush's idiotic pandering to illegal immigrants could be extremely unpopular if a clever opponent took it and ran with it. Couple that with some innovative tax cutting and reforms and you suddenly have a race.
Well, I'm going to have to disagree with you here on one point. In a perfect world, yes Social Security and Medicare would not be considered a tax. However (and this is especially true of Social Security), what reason should I use to not consider this just another tax with a different label due to the very fact that congress continues to borrow out of the SS fund for things that are appropriated with my OTHER tax money? Then, to add salt to the wound, reports turn around and say that the Social Security fund won't even be available for MY generation, even though my dollars are going into someone else's social security paycheck? Tax or not, it is still something that I am paying out of my check because supposedly the government can manage my money better than I can. I'd rather invest the money myself and just bypass the government completely. I wish! No, my last day of employment is January 31'st. At that point, I will either have a new job or I will be taking some money out of the system while looking for a new job. Since I won't get my money out of the system when I am 65, I might as well take a little of it now!
Our founding fathers said taxes on income was illegal and unconstitutional. For 130 years in this country we made it without taxing income. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that our government started going after our income. I wish we would go back to our old tax system. We need a national sales tax like the one Alan Keyes Proposed in 2000. Of course that would be too fair and drive the liberals nuts. So fat chance of that happening.
of course not - the tax burden on US citizens is already staggering. it's impossible to believe that far more than the cost of the bush cuts couldn't trimmed out of the massively over-bloated fed. budget easily. that said, bush can't be left out, because the choice is not tax vs. no-tax: if they give the US a choice between a tax-happy socialist on the left, and another 4 years of preemptive wars, police-state crackdowns, a draft, and patriot acts 3, 4, and 5 on the right -- the choice is not so easy. AAA is right - dean should drop the tax stuff asap, or at least limit it to screwing the rich, which is always popular.
â¢"A married couple with two children and income of $40,000 will see their taxes increase by $1,933 (from $45 to $1,978), an increase of 4,296 percent." â¢"A married couple with two children and income of $60,000 will see their taxes increase by $1,700 (from $2,850 to $4,550), an increase of 60 percent." "A married couple with two children and income of $75,000 will see their taxes increase by $1,700 (from $4,695 to $6,395), an increase of 36 percent."
My response to Stephen Moore (Club For Growth aka Radical Right Propagandists) is as follows. 1. No one likes paying taxes. In order to have the resources required to do the things society needs (i.e. education, highways, the legal system, defense, environmental protection, etc.) taxes are necessary. We can pay them now or we can borrow and pay them (plus interest) later. 2. We want pay as few taxes as possible but borrowing and spending is less responsible than taxing and spending. The concept that "the public debt doesn't matter" is false. When the debt gets too large it "crowds out" private borrowing (decreasing investment) and can lead to catastrophic economic collapse (think about Argentina) when people lose confidence in the society's ability to repay what it has borrowed. 3. If society needs to do certain things, and needs the resources required, it is really not an issue of which level of government does the job. Local, state, federal even world have their roles but the resources required are the real point. Shifting costs from the federal to the state or local governments is just a way of sending the same bill to another address. We, the taxpayers, get it just the same. 4. Given that we need to raise a certain amount of revenue the question is ... How to do it? What is the most fair way to raise the necessary taxes? The key concept is "ability to pay". The larger the individuals' income (other things equal) the less the "sacrifice" to give up $1 in taxes. In fact, the whole point of a progressive tax system is that giving up 1% of your income is much more of a sacrifice for low income people (other things equal) than for high income people. 5. All individuals seek to pay as little taxes as possible. People with good political connections can get tax law written in ways that provide them special benefits. This is what we call tax loopholes. Bush's "tax cut" is properly Bush's "tax loophole Christmas tree". 6. People with large incomes seek to minimize the proportion of taxes raised through taxes on income. They much prefer taxes on consumer purchases (sales), wages (social security) or real estate (property tax). They want tax loopholes (special treatment on income) for speculation (capital gains), equity income(dividends), Income from oil wells (depreciation allowances) and so on. 7. People with great wealth do not like inheritance taxes. The rest of us recognize that great fortunes (over $2 million, $10 million?) should not just grow and grow, on their own, generation after generation. If they do democracy and equality of opportunity are threatened. Renaming the inheritance tax the "death tax" is a perfect example of the Bush administration's manipulative posturing. 8. The so called "marriage penalty" (or Bush's new "marriage subsidy"), the 10% tax rate, and the increased child exemption are minor matters that were just thrown in just to obscure the real issues. They could easily be re-enacted in separate legislation. 9. The great problem is knowing what is real and what is not. Governing is regulating, political posturing is striking a pose. The Bush administration and Stephen Moore are striking what they imagine to be an attractive political posture. The goal is winning an election. Governing, for the benefit of the nation, is something quite different.
The income tax usurps privacy, allows the federal government to control income and paves a path to tyranny. Few issues provide such an enduring occasion for political debate as the question of how to fund the federal government - the question of taxes. In recent years, we have approached national agreement that the current system is deeply and perhaps fatally flawed. Accordingly, politicians have presented various versions of what they call "fundamental reform". But much of the talk of fundamental reform is really an effort to tinker with the existing tax system in order to help diffuse growing public discomfort and even outrage. Few political leaders are willing to consider the most necessary change because it would involve removing politicians from the gatekeeper role over income and resources of all Americans. Real reform requires abolishing the income tax and returning to the system our founders intended. This means funding the federal government with tariffs, duties and excise taxes or sales taxes, not with the privacy destroying income tax. We should return to our nation's original tax. Government controls decisions: Our founders frequently quoted a principle from William Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws of England. " A power over a man's resources is a power over his will." To control the resource base of a decision maker is to control his decisions. But the ultimate decision-maker in American life and politics must be the people. And the people cannot be free without a resource base of material comfort and sustenance free from government domination or control. A tax system putting government in control of the people's income tends irresistibly to put government in control of political decisions as well. The founders sought to avoid this path to tyranny, so they declared a direct tax on the income of individuals unconstitutional. The reversal of that wisdom came during the "progressive" era at the beginning of the 20th century. A mentality of class warfare prevailed at the time; a first flush of socialism in American life, and the income tax movement was one of its results. Setting farmers against industrialists, urban folk against rural, poor against rich, everyone was led to expect than an income tax would hit the other group harder. Chiefly, of course, the argument was that the rich would pay a disproportionate share. What they didn't tell us was that in this socialist scheme, everyone with a private dollar is suspected of being too rich. We ought to have realized that the income tax is utterly incompatible with liberty. It is actually a form of slavery. A slave is someone the fruit of whose labor is controlled by somebody else. A slave is not somebody with nothing. Rather, he has only what the master lets him have. Under the income tax, the government takes whatever percentage of the earner's income it wants. The income tax, therefore, represents our national surrender to the government of control over all the money we earn. There are, in principle, no restrictions to the pre-emptive claim the government has upon our income. No American government has seriously pressed this claim on our income to its logical conclusion - the explicit demand that all income be handed over to the government and any private expenditures made subject to government approval. But we are deeply unwise to underestimate the power of the confiscatory principle in the hands of a government determined to pursue its advantage. The federal government could bankrupt the country in short order, merely by deciding to insist more aggressively than it already does on collecting the money we have already agreed it has the right to take. We must insist on the erection of constitutional protection, beyond the reach of any congress or president to override, of the fact that American citizens own the dollars they earn. Without such protection, we hold these dollars merely subject to the government's revocable permission. The withholding tax system disguises this dangerous loss of control. One of the effects of withholding is that we don't even realize that government money is actually our money. Most of us think that only our net pay - our actual paycheck - is our money, and what is withheld is the government's money. We tend to think this because the government simply grabs part of the money we have earned. I once heard a caller to a talk radio show object to the proposal that taxpayers cover the savings and loan debacle, demanding instead that the government pay for it, as though the government could pay for anything without using dollars taken from us. Surrender of Privacy. The income tax threatens our liberty in many ways, but surely the most alarming and outrageous is its requirement that we surrender our privacy by exposing all the sources of our income to the government. One of the prudent protections of liberty is to treat the government, which today seems to be your friend, as if tomorrow it could become your enemy. No army exposes all lines of supply and all resources even to its allies, much less to its potential enemies. While our government is not our enemy in the traditional sense, our founders were ever mindful that liberty depends upon vigilance against the temptations of tyranny. That's why, if we mean to retain our freedom, it is our duty to maintain material resources for action that the government cannot control and manipulate. But with the income tax, we surrender the ability to maintain economic associations without the knowledge of the government.
It even gets worse. Through government social engineering, such as bestowing a revocable "501-C3" non-profit status on churches, the government is able to manipulate the tax system in order to gain control over our institutions of conscience, character and moral formation. The American Revolution itself would never have happened without the courage of such institutions, particularly churches. The same is true of the abolition of slavery and of all other great movements of conscience in American history. These efforts were decisively motivated by principled private associations, the role once played by these institutions in boldly challenging us to oppose inroads against our liberty has been gutted. As a result of the income tax, we have subjected the entire sector of conscience to the control and manipulation of the government. As a result we have muffled what ought to be the voice of independent faith and conscientious action in our society. National Sales Tax. We don't need to improve the income tax. We need to get rid of it! Our founding fathers had a simple and clear vision of a citizenry with control over the money it worked to earn and with the corresponding ability and independent judgment to exercise its rightful authority over government. Whether to save money or spend it was intended to be a matter of the sovereign liberty of citizens, who would decide what to do with every dollar. Under a national sales tax, this is exactly what would happen. Only after we decide what to do with our money can the portion used for purchases in the open marketplace be subject to tax. The sales tax requires no surrender of privacy, no confession to the government of our entire economic life. Furthermore, a sales tax would make it much harder to avoid paying legitimate federal tax without good reason. Those in criminal enterprises who have never filed a federal tax return would have to pay the national sales tax charged by the merchants who provide his goods and services. When such a person enters the marketplace to make a purchase, he would pay the tax that everyone else is paying. The sales tax is a more equitable system, because the incidence of taxation is more evenly distributed throughout the population. But under a national sales tax system, equity would not come at the price of giving up control of our money. Rather, a national sales tax would restore to American working people their control over the incidence of taxation. Only the relatively well-off have that opportunity under the present system because they can hire lawyers and accountants to calculate the most advantageous tax strategies and exploit arbitrary technicalities. The most important goal of tax policy must be reclaiming control over taxation, on which dollars and how much of our income the tax actually falls. Today, taxation is entirely outside of the control of most working Americans because it is determined by politicians and bureaucrats and manipulated by clever lawyers and accountants. The liberating power of a national sales tax system is that it would end their control. Under a sales tax system, individual citizens would again be sovereign in deciding how much of their money will be subject to the tax at any given moment, according to their particular financial circumstances. Such a system will give us back control over our money that we have not had in generations -not since the income tax was imposed. And that control will be financially crucial to families. When times are tight, instead of praying for politicians to pass a beneficent tax cut, Americans will have the power to give themselves tax cuts just by changing their spending and saving patterns. We already reduce our discretionary expenditures when money becomes tight, and under a sales tax system our tax burden would also become a discretionary expenditure. Congress will pass a national sales tax only when the people insist on it. To bring this day closer, it will be necessary to turn the attention of grassroots America to the real tax debate. That debate is not only about the rate of taxation and the bloated size of government. It also is about the right to property and the preservation of our liberty. Americans must come to see that the tax reform we so urgently need is not more back room manipulation of the income tax and its ever mutatable rates, schedules and regulations but rather its total replacement with the system our founders intended. We must remind our fellow citizens that the income tax is less than 100 years old, and that the nation did fine for a long time without it. A national sales tax is not a radical new proposal but is actually a return to the sensible and consistent understanding of liberty that the founders of America established. Returning to a sales tax is sound conservative thinking, which restores the system of taxation that stood the test of time in its proven compatibility with liberties of our people. The republic survived difficult trials in its early years in part because we had a tax system that left the citizenry independent enough to successfully discipline its government. America was built by people who, rightly and nobly, used the control over their actions and resources that a wise political order secured for them. The income tax expropriates the independence that made possible American prosperity, American character and ultimately American self-government. By keeping the income tax, we are inexorably encouraging moral poverty - the poverty of motivation, of discipline and of responsibility - that we all sense has deepened in the America of recent decades. By wisely turning back to the wisdom of our founders, we can renew an economic environment of wholesome motivation in which responsibility pays and in which discipline makes a difference. Real tax reform can help us make an historic break with the service and passive habits of recent years and begin a new era of confident liberty. If we still believe we deserve - and have the capacity - to be free, ending the income tax is a duty to ourselves and our posterity