[jiggyboy]

Oh they want a VAT all right. The days of five percent salary raises, jumping from one job to another for a nice raise, and full-time employment itself are over for half of the workforce. That means lower income taxes, forever. A VAT is the way they can keep picking your pocket.

[unixfox]

The only way to get tax reform is to have a MAJOR tax revolt.

Kill the foxes in the henhouse.

[DManA]

Sun setting the IRS code is the best idea I have seen in decades. Anyone opposing it is outing himself as a virulent statist.

[marron]

Its increasingly clear to me that freeom is not possible without financial privacy. And financial privacy is not possible legally with our current tax code.

A free man has the right to keep his finances private. In the current system, the state asserts ownership of you no matter where you are in the world.

[Fraxinus]

Economist Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate and failed Obama nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, set the liberal blogosphere buzzing last year with a Wall Street Journal op-ed that cited his research suggesting that “raising the top tax rate is very likely to result in revenue increases at least until we reach the 50% rate that held during the first Reagan administration, and possibly until the 70% rate of the 1970s.”

But Diamond’s research is a poor model for instructing policymakers because it makes two dubious assumptions: (1) High-income taxpayers react to tax hikes more or less like lower-income taxpayers do (meaning not so much), and (2) high marginal rates have no long-term impact on economic growth. For a real-world reality check, look at what happened when Great Britain recently raised its top marginal tax rate from 40 to 50 percent. The government found it took in less tax revenue, not more.

This guy needs to double check his figures, he may be right that the revenue will increase up to 70%, but that is 70% total taxes (fed,state, and local). If you leave room for local and state, any tax federal tax rates over 30-40% will see a steep decline as you push larger numbers of people into the 50-70% region from their state and local taxes. I think CA and NY residents are both well past 80% top marginal rates today.