Posted on 04/14/2015 11:57:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, expected to soon announce his candidacy for president, plans to steal Democrats' thunder and target income inequality by campaigning on a tax plan that he promises will "reward families with children while slashing levies on business and investment income but keeping a top rate personal income rate of 35 percent," according to Politico.
Rubio’s plan, a joint effort with Utah Sen. Mike Lee, pares down tax brackets to just two — 15 percent and 35 percent, while also creating a new child tax credit worth $2,500 and eliminating the estate tax, Politico reports.
For corporations, the top rate would be 25 percent — a 10 percent cut from the current rate — and allows for immediate deductions on investments. It also calls for a "territorial tax system that would not apply U.S. tax rates to foreign income earned abroad by U.S. businesses." "America right now suffers from slow growth, and the growth there is doesn’t seem to be helping most Americans, including the folks who vote in GOP primaries," according to economic analyst James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute.
"The Rubio-Lee plan would address both issues through sweeping corporate tax reform and cutting investment taxes while also directing immediate tax relief for families."
Rubio’s complex tax plan may not gain much traction within the party, Washington-based political consultant Rich Danker writes in a Forbes column bearing the headline, "Marco Rubio's Economic Policy Needs A Reboot."
"It’s implausible that this tax plan will excite Republican voters because most won’t understand it or see much benefit from it," Danker writes. "There’s little for them to get excited about in a plan that would leave the top rate practically unchanged while adding to the deficit ($414 billion according to the Tax Foundation).
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
>> Anything else is not tax law — it’s social engineering.
Exactly.
And governments absolutely suck at social engineering. Proven time and time again.
Ping.
He is a typical politician. Addicted to finger-pokin’.
Find me a way to shrink IRS to 10 percent of its present size and reach, and I’ll know you get the problem.
I’ve heard Cruz say he favors the Fair Tax but thinks we have to get there incrementally, with the first step being a Flat Tax. I like the Fair Tax (also called the Consumption Tax), as well.
See Post 24. Cruz on Fair Tax.
Having only two “brackets” doesn’t make the tax law simpler. Does he take us for fools?
Mike Lee is a great guy. Knocked off that bombastic clown Bennett who acted like being a Senator was his birthright.
But it’s an incremental approach at a time when we should just go nuclear on the concept of income taxation, and especially federal income taxation.
Repeal the 16th. It was a Bolshevik idea in the first place.
No “fair tax”, no “flat tax”. Just get the damn fedgov out of the individual taxation business. They have no right to reach into the States and affect the lives of the Citizens of the States.
The States should send in whatever their representatives in the Congress vote to assess for membership in the gang. And their Senators should be appointed and controlled by the State legislatures as originally envisioned. They represent the State, not the people. That’s what the House is for.
When we had a system like this the United States went from being an obscure British colony to the most powerful and economically successful country on Earth in one century.
Never before had the power of wealth accumulation shown itself to be so incredibly productive. People went from subsistence farmers to wealthy investors living on their coupons in a couple of generations.
Can happen again.
It doesn’t matter what plan they propose. Democrats will simply scream that it’s a War On THE CHILLREN and THE PO.
The GOP ‘leadership’ will then fold and we will have exactly the same thing we have now.
“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.
In fact, Sen. Rubio’s Constitution-oblivious tax plan is a good example why the ill-conceived 17th Amendment should never have been ratified, state lawmakers foolishly giving up their voices in Congress by ratifying that amendment.
The 17th Amendment needs to disappear.
I wish more reporters could do math or just state the current corporate tax rate of 35%. A 10% cut would bring it down to 31.5% Cutting it to 25% represents a cut of roughly 28.6%.
The economic reality is that it is a damn good idea. Multinational corporations find legal ways to move their profits to countries with low corporate tax rates. This is almost always accompanied by more hiring and well as more operations in those places.
However, for the economically semi-literate (at least 70% of the populace), it is poison. Count all of those political ads aimed at this audience using phrases like these
“My CPA hates the idea though. :-)”
Simplifying the tax code to the level you suggest would put a LOT of tax professionals out of work. Not that I have a problem with that, mind you. :)
Any kind of revenue-neutral tax reform inevitably means some will pay more while others get a break. Those that get a tax break will yawn, while those hit with any increase in taxes will scream.
It is a lose-lose. That is why few Republican presidential candidates will endorse The Fair Tax, and even Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan was attacked so aggressively it ended up being a negative.
“Rubio is OUT”......OF HIS MIND.
Two brackets is more complicated than the seven tax brackets plus the AMT we have today?
There should be ZERO federal taxes on individuals. All federal money should be allocated from the states. Congress should raise money only by passing a REQUEST for a levy on each state, based on the size or their populations.
The states, as sovereign entities, could never be required to pay the feds. But if the requests were kept reasonable, most of them would cooperate most of the time.
The money sent to the Feds should be used entirely to accomplish its enumerated powers. So, there would be no federal welfare programs — no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc. Federal highway funds also would not exist because highways in the borders of each states would be maintained locally. Same with education dollars.
Well, there's a real middle class A$$ pounder if there ever was?
Patsy Schroeder of the 80's used to rant on about the tax code indexed for inflation. A family of four in 1985 wouldn't begin to owe $1 until over $47K if the federal income tax were indexed for inflation.
And she was a liberal democrat.
I searched BING and found that Cruz does support a FAIR TAX. He said a fair tax would be the biggest ever return of power back to the people. It would also make OBAMA CARE illegal.
The Fair Tax proposal original began in 1994 as a flat tax. Over $20 million was spent in researching better tax systems. Smart business people do not spend $20M on bad ideas.
The group eventually realized any national income tax would continue to have problems, which is why they took their flat income tax with a single large deduction (similar to Jack Kemp's proposal from the 1980s), and rebuilt it to a national retail sales tax with a "prebate" to cover the sales tax on essentials.
The problem with The Fair Tax is most people are sheep who have lost track of how much the Federal Government keeps of their paycheck each week, and actually looks forward to the Federal Government paying back the interest free loan people give the government each year.
Does it have weaknesses? Sure, any tax reform does. But any income tax requires filing tax returns, requires a full-function IRS, and will invite lobbying and meddling in Washington.
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