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To: GregoryFul

It would be nice if that could be done. I think the models done at Heritage, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard have done those things. I've only seen very broad summaries of how various groups are affected.

Then again, the CBO and the Joint Committe for Taxation in Congress are charged with doing this sort of analysis and historically are never even close. These are the people that projected a tax-revenue increase from the luxury tax and instead destroyed the yacht-building industry and had a net loss in revenue. They are also the ones that expected a revenue loss from the Bush tax cuts and instead we've had a revenue increase such that the deficit is $100B less than projected.

I don't have much faith in these estimates.

It also begs the question: Is a tax a "good" tax for somebody just because it mean a lower tax for that person ? This is the game that has been played with the income tax -- one group is singled out as prey for a tyranny of the majority. The next year it is a different group. Government gets bigger and bigger as long as a majority thinks they won't be paying for the increase.

Why can't we decide based on the philosophical approach ?

If you want to plug your own numbers -- or any hypothetical person's -- into a calculator, there is one available at:

http://www.salestax.org/FairTaxCalculator.htm

And this is a comparison of various tax plans including tax rates by income group:

http://www.pafairtax.org/resrcs/FlatTaxFairTaxComparison.pdf


226 posted on 09/13/2005 12:49:14 PM PDT by Kellis91789
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To: Kellis91789
These are the people that projected a tax-revenue increase from the luxury tax and instead destroyed the yacht-building industry and had a net loss in revenue. They are also the ones that expected a revenue loss from the Bush tax cuts and instead we've had a revenue increase such that the deficit is $100B less than projected.

I have no doubt that some groups can put together very poor simulation models - I've seen government created software, and I have little faith in it. But I expect that there are professional groups that can put models together that are back tested and verified to be good at predicting the outcome of an econometric change such as this, and at low cost compared with the potential cost of failure and disruption in this radical change in taxation method.

You're selling this as a "Fair Tax", I assume that you mean that everybody currently being taxed will not see a significant change in their tax burden. I do not believe that. I would like to see some verifiable scientific proof of that claim, not a philosophical blow job.

227 posted on 09/13/2005 5:06:31 PM PDT by GregoryFul
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