Good points again. Until I read this thread about the impact of e-commerce on state/local sales tax revenues, I was all for sales tax at both state and federal levels using the FairTax at both level.
I don’t want to see property taxes, business taxes, cap gain taxes and on and on.
I always thought states and locals could subsist off sales tax but now am not so sure.
I don’t support taxing internet retailers as this thread discusses.
So what to do?
I know there is a lot of waste and so people are fed up with all the spending and would like to see spending cuts.
But if we could define a list of essential services such as you started to point out, and then use a revenue stream taken from US Treasury Bonds to fund only those essential services, then that would leave all the socialists with pretty much nowhere to go to panhandle for tax money, because that is exactly what they are, political panhandlers.
So now I see the FairTax would work at the federal level but not necessarily at the state level if we enact laws barring states from taxing internet sales and sales tax revenues begin to decline.
So what’s left in the tax engineering design is how to fund a list of essential services at the state/local level without using taxes on property, business, cap gains, income and also reduced in-state sales.
The beauty of attaching revenues from US treasury bonds is that the federal government could sell the bonds at a discount to state and local governments, limit the quantity of discounted bonds by constitutional apportionment and mandate that the interest revenue from discounted bonds be used only for the defined essential services.
As far as the bond market stability, I know things now are precarious but federal bonds should not default although their market value can plummet. The reason they won’t default IMO is because the Fed will just monetize the debt, which they have been doing of late. The danger is hyperinflation but we are in a deflationary environment in many respects, and also all currencies float leaving the benchmark GDP performance amd other relative measures to interact and set the price of a dollar against commodities and other things ecnomic. IOW we the USA will likely remain at the top of a giant mudslide of all falling economies. So we may be shielded from hyper-inflation. We will see, Geithner and the Fed are getting away with it for now because so many other economies are doing so poorly relative to the USA.
I really liked also ALPAPilot pointing out the history of fire protection being a matter for property insurers and for property tax to fund fire departments.
BTW...complete repeals and deletions of those ordinances. Most men of some ingenuity won’t be asking for variances. Hard feelings have gone too far for that. If locals want caps on sizes of local manufacturing operations, they could do that (e.g., small maximum number of employees, say between 4 and 10). Unreasonable flooring costs (leases, etc.) have killed more new businesses than anything else. Allow the technologically inclined to start on their home properties. No one should be bothered by a small operation on, for example, a neighboring 35 acres or so, and we already do such projects as hobbies.
...more considerations on rural manufacturing. Nuisance regulations (noise, restricted to indoors, traffic, etc.) would be necessary to keep it from being squashed.