Ok, I'll try this again. I COMPLETELY DISAGREE WITH THE PREMISE THAT COLLECTING TAXES HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW THEY ARE SPENT. It should!! It is the disconnection that allows the current unballanced conditions to be perpetual. They need to understand that if the existing tax, Fair tax, Flat tax, whatever tax system, is in place that they need to have spending constraints. For every dollar collected, spend maybe spend seventy cents and retire some old debts with a portion of the balance. Then save the rest for panned spending. To play the game of how you go about collecting revenues is just that, A GAME! To tell me that they will collect even more revenue and then we'll be ok only allows more spending games to be added on, "because we can!" More of the noise that Americans are hurtin' out there so the government needs to step in by the politicians will have many asking the wrong question, "Is there money there for the plan?" The true question should be, "What do you need to do differently out there to make it?" Or here's the question that I emplore the youth to ask when I speak. I tell them to find a successful person and ask them this two parter: 1) How did you make it without a government program? And the real deep commitment question: 2) Is it too late for me to change the things that I do in my life to have the same kind of potential? The real hard piece involves the "change" part as most want to hold on to some semblance of what they currently are doing. I also tell them not to ask career government workers, life politicians, people who are just makin' it, people just holdin' on, anyone who is just existing, anyone who's gameplan has them just living day-to-day, and folks who are in the same strata that they are. For obvious reasons...
The FairTax is progressive in that MOST wealthy people will pay more taxes, because they generally spend more. The poor will not pay a dime in taxes. What do you mean by not accepting the social and political consequences of schemes like this??? Look, for me it's a no brainer. FairTax or the current tax code. It's like you go to your friends house to watch the SuperBowl and he says"You want something to eat? Would you rather have pizza and a cold beer or would you like a burnt piece of toast and a cup of water?" That's how far apart the two are.
How about no Federal or Payroll Taxes AT ALL. At the poverty level, a person pays ZERO. Wouldn't your father like to receive 100% of his pension, rather than paying taxes on it?
I like to believe it was Libertarian thinking. Give us Liberty or give us death! They might if enough people tell them they're not going to vote for them. Hey, what can I say, this is a grassroots effort. You gotta make it happen.
Oddly enough, he says no. He'd not have an issue with taxes if he felf that he was seeing the positive results (whatever that means). And I really don't think it realistic that we'd care or expect to have NO TAXES at all. Isn't that the system that has the third world, the third world? You need national infratsructure and that needs to be covered, controlled and paid for nationally. There are a ton of little towns all across America that would not be viable without the government dole. The services that we enjoy nationally such as water works, the interstate systems, electrical grids and such would not have happened without (gulp! dare I say it), wasteful spending plans. Let's face it, the trouble is not the tax system, it's the mismanagement of the fiscal resources to socially engineer attitudes, elections and the culture.
I understand you have a concern for spending. I do to, but what you're saying is, lets tackle TWO HUGE ISSUES AT THE SAME TIME. I think we need to inject some common sense here. It would be a gigantic change for government to innact the FairTax. But, a gigantic change for the better. One step at a time.
Agreed! We just have a basic difference of which end of this elephant to eat first. I would vote for the spending end to best stop the hemmoraging. Then we can have a better grasp on optimizing the way to take in monies. In blocking up the outflows, should some political type find a way to short circut the tax change process, we will have at least put a sizable dent in the spending armor. I think there would then be some unintended benefits in monies being trapped within the mechanisim. Then, if we can ignore, Jesse, Al, special interest groups and the like for the handout messages they bring, we will start a climb back in the national fiscal strength arenas.
It was the desire to express their religious beliefs without interference from the King of England. So, which is it? Is it liberal thinking to express religious beliefs or conservative thinking to express religious beliefs?
I am a big proponet of the Fair Tax. I know the Fair Tax is not linked to spending, they are separate. But I agree that budget control is a first priority. Until this is done it makes no sense to talk about changing the tax code(which I believe is one of the most obnoxious things created by the government). Did you know that atleast 8% of our taxes go just to pay the interest on our debt? Did you know that we spend more on our military then the next 15 largest military spending countries combined? Our total military spending (which includes current military spending, war on terror and in iraq, veterans benefits and pensions) is about half of the total federal budget. Does anyone else find this ridiculous? Why do we still have bases in Germany and Japan? We spend a lot on social programs too. I am sure a lot of this is unneccessary, but it is harder for me to argue this, but not so hard to argue that our military spending is out of control seeing as the next largest spending country is China at about 1/6 of what we spend. Since this is a thread about the Fair Tax(I have not read the book, but have read a lot online about it), I will talk about that. Currently about $350 billion in taxes are not collected that should be. This accounts for about 14% of all taxes collected or 30% of income taxes. This is called the tax gap. This is usually due to underroporting of income and other tax avoidance methods. This number does not account for the underground economy, which includes drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, ect. With the fair tax, it is much more difficult to avoid paying taxes and taxes that wouldn't have been collected before from the underground economy would also be collected. So in essence, if you are an honest citizen and pay the taxes you owe, these other sources of income should lower your taxes (only works if government learns how to balance a budget and curtail spending). There would still be a need for the IRS, granted it would shrink. They would still need to audit coporations, to make sure they collect the right amount of sales taxes. But instead of 170 million filers, there would be around 14 million filers, so it should be easier to enforce businesses to pay the right amount of sales tax. With the Fair Tax you are truly free. How can you say you are free when you don't have a choice whether you pay taxes or not. The government takes them without asking, and if you don't pay you go to jail. That doesn't sound like freedom to me. Atleast with the Fair Tax you can choose when and where you will pay taxes. Granted there are some things that are hard to live without, like food and water. But atleast you are more free with this system. And with this system everyone is on an equal playing field. Everyone gets the same prebate check every month. Everyone pays the same sales tax rate. The prebate check is a great way to keep the tax from crippling the poor. But since it will be a larger percentage of their income it helps them more. It will help them afford neccessities. The Fair Tax should also give people more of an incentive to save. If they know that if they save they won't get taxed now or later when the withdraw it, and the only way they will get taxed is if they spend it. As a country we consume way too much and don't save, hence the need for Social Security and other forms of wellfare. Maybe, and this may be a stretch, but with the extra incentive of saving, people might actually do it and won't need to relie on Social Security as much (which should be phased out IMO). Anyway I could ramble on a lot more about the advantages of the Fair Tax, but this has been long enough as it is. But first things first, we need to curtail excessive spending in government. I would like agreements and/or disagreements with what I have written. Please correct me if I am wrong.