hehehehe...
Posted on 08/16/2007 6:10:39 PM PDT by RobFromGa
If direct taxes upon the wages of labour have not always occasioned a proportionable rise in those wages, it is because they have generally occasioned a considerable fall in the demand for labour. The declension of industry, the decrease of employment for the poor, the diminuation of the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, have generally been the effect of such taxes.... Absurd and destructive as such taxes are, however, they take place in many countries.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.
The wrestling metaphor is something along the lines of “you’ll just get yourself dirty and the pig enjoys it.” Basically the same point.
That's why I don't play here much anymore as I have a bill to get passed!
we have never tried anything like this? How about the various state sales taxes...how about the excise taxes...come on, I think alot of the doubters are in the tax preparing industry. And how are non profits going to be taxed? They will still have their exemptions. You never commented on the fact that the founders never included an income tax. The founders of communism did though, because they knew how to get as much money as possible and try to spread the wealth, by force, of course. Whereas if everyone keeps all of their earnings, the prosperoty in the country will be awesome. The displaced tax industry workers will have no problem finding better work. Your agruements just don’t hold water. I hope next year will be the time that Americans finally throw off the heavy burden of the income tax, finally.
Compared to the evil intentions and motives you routinely attribute to those who oppose the FairTax with no evidence, my statment was much more supported.
Why all this talk of pigs and dogs all of a sudden? :-)
But, but... I thought income taxes were Marxist
Sorry! but none of that sounds even remotely like the Fairtax to me and proves what I said earlier. Thay you guys don't want to talk about the Fairtax but something else entirely!From a consumer's standpoint (that's what xcamel was talking about) a credit/invoice VAT is no different than a NRST.
We all do! W're not gonna let the pro-IRS folks dominate the debate in the 2008 elections.
No state has a 30% plus sales tax on every single good and service. Florida tried to put a sales tax on services and abandoned it as unworkable.
If you are going to push the plan, then you need to consider that people might take action to avoid such a high tax, and figure out what that will do to revenue.
Since low tax revenue that will trigger an automatic hike in the tax rate, causing more evasion, I would suggest as an engineer that the feedback in this system is totally unstable.
That's why I don't play here much anymore as I have a bill to get passed!LOL! Yeah, how's that going???
Adam Smith, the father of modern economic thought, had a lot to say about taxation still great book Wealth of Nations pp. 561-64. Here is what he had to say about bad taxes:
1. A tax was bad that required a large bureaucracy for administration.
2. A tax was bad that "may obstruct the industry of the people, and discouraged them from applying to certain branches which might give maintenance and employment to great multitudes. While it obliges the people to pay, it may thus diminish, or perhaps destroy, some of the funds which might enable them more easily to do so."
3. A tax was bad that encouraged evasion. "The law, contrary all the ordinary principals of justice, first creates the temptation, and then punishes those who yield to it." Evasion is also bad, says Smith, because it tends to "put an end to the benefits which the community might have received from the employment of their capitals."
4. A tax is bad that put the people through "odious examinations of the tax-gatherers, and exposes them to much unnecessary trouble, vexation, and oppression...It is in one or other of these four different ways that taxes are frequently so much more burdensome to the people than they are beneficial to the sovereign"
I ask you, which of these are NOT true of our current tax system?
Better than I expected in fact!
you make mistatements in your arguements. The fairtax is proposed at 23% of goods, not over 30%. Who said services too? And you fail to mention all of the billions of spending that the underground people will be paying into the system because they will be forced to pay to by their goods.
Except that one, the credit/invoice VAT, is of necessity encumbered by government bureaucrats deciding just what "value" was added at every stage and how the "credits" will be distributed.
Sorry! No sale!
I'll take the NRST and particularly the FairTax over that any day!
The fairtax would be $.23 of each dollar spent at the point of retail sale on NEW goods and services only.
Except that one, the credit/invoice VAT, is of necessity encumbered by government bureaucrats deciding just what "value" was added at every stage and how the "credits" will be distributed.Huh? You really have no clue how a VAT works, do you?
One of us sure as heck doesn't and I STRONGLY suspect that YOU are the one!
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