Best solution? Scrap the current system of taxes and entitlements. Impose a negative income tax, ala Milton Friedman, to replace the assorted Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, public housing etc. crap. Impose an income tax with few or no deductions.
I have no problem with reasonable progressivity -- and the beauty of a flat tax isn't its flatness, it's the removal of deductions. So have four tax levels or so -- nothing under $35000, 10% between 35000 and 50000, 15% between 50000 and 200000, 25% above 200000. Plenty of revenue, low marginal rates, nothing wasted in compliance, pro-growth.
I have no problem with reasonable progressivity -- and the beauty of a flat tax isn't its flatness, it's the removal of deductions. So have four tax levels or so -- nothing under $35000, 10% between 35000 and 50000, 15% between 50000 and 200000, 25% above 200000. Plenty of revenue, low marginal rates, nothing wasted in compliance, pro-growth.
I however have a problem with reporting my family finances to the government and that being used as a club over my head by the IRS, not to mention the other negative of the income tax system:
| "As a matter of fact, what the income tax does — and this is the debate that I think we always try to get into in order to let you and him fight, see — and the people of this country are led down a path where the actual control of their resources, which in the end is the control over their will, is handed off to the government." . . . "The government then manipulates that will in order to destroy the freedom of our electoral system through the income tax structure, and we call the resulting slavery a free system." "In point of fact, it is not as the founders understood, and the only way to restore real freedom is to give people back control over the income that they earn so that they won‘t, at the voting booth and in other phony issues, be subject to that manipulation." |