All government is socialist, so let's just get over it.
You get over it, I have no intention of supporting it.
That being the case, taxes must be collected, and this in spite of any popular sentiments to the contrary.
LOL, indeed, lets just go out an pillage the folks anyway.
APT is the most efficient way to accomplish this in terms of it's effects on the private economy and the government's ability to collect necessary revenue.
Not interested in any tax that is effecient for government to collect. Just means that the economy and the American people are more easily raped. No thank you.
The harder it is for government to raise revenue the more easily the electorate can hold government to its constitutional bounderies.
To remove perception of the tax burdens of the individual, is to remove the goad which assures accountability of government to the electorate. Federal tax rates are high and government grows ever larger because a majority of the electorate do not perceive proportionately the burden their demand for largesse imposes on the minority of citizens.
The siren call for representation without taxation is the formula that got us where we are at today. The ability to hide or disguise taxation from the view of large sectors of the electorate allows the Congress to get away with the creation of the evergrowing monster that it fosters.
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
-George Bernard Shaw
Liberty and freedom have a price, responsibility. If that the perception of that price is avoided there are no brakes on the growth of government, the ultimate result is the end of freedom through creeping socialism.
Go pedal your snake oil elsewhere.
With your insistence on transparency, you're fighting the last war.
Visibility of cost to the electorate is the war.
LBJ's "Great Society" and Jimmy Carter's "malaise" are things of the past.
Sure it is,
As attributed to University of Edinburgh University History professor and Scottish jurist Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813). by John Bagot Glubb :
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage."
Them's as can't learn from history, are certainly bound to repeat it.
Competitiveness is the keynote theme of the ensuing information economy.
LOL, so you assure the government has the edge in competiveness for that marginal dollar. No thanks, that is just a faster way down into that ageold and well worn abyss.
"The American Republic will endure until the politicians learn they can bribe the people with their own money."
Alexis d'Tocqueville, The American Democracy (1841)
As always the same old fight, just a change of names to protect the guilty.