Posted on 01/31/2013 6:05:49 AM PST by Kaslin
If the fair tax were imposed as planned it would "get rid" of the IRS but there would still have to be people running both the prebate and sales tax audit systems. That organization wouldn't be any bigger than the IRS after a Flat tax.
ASSUME=ASS U ME
That’s true not because of the property tax but the principle of “eminent domain,” which no government will ever sacrifice. We pretend to believe in this thing called popular sovereignty, but when you get down to it there’s still the realm. A country is its soil, and government owns its soil, end of political philosophy.
Even without a property tax your land is never really yours, for they can take it whenever they want. According to SCOTUS it need not be for public use, and you have no right to just compensation.
I assume it won’t be there, others assume it will. There isn’t really any other option, unless you choose not to think about it, but that’s cheating. You can hedge to be covered for either scenario, but “ass u me”-ing doesn’t forestall that.
Property taxes are not the evilest taxes; inflation is eviler. Not that money is more important than real property. It’s damned important, but not that important. The thing is when they come after your property you may not he able to resist, but at least you know it. Your noticing restricts gubmint, for they must fear your reaction.
Not so inflation. Even experts don’t actually know crap about it. Money is the great mysterious force of economies. It is the highway of progress and the tide of destruction. Less poetically, it is fungible. You can’t tell when you’re being bilked, not like with oldtimey coin clipping, not until afterwards.
Needless to say gubmint loves it. You won’t get Poppa Joe pointing hus shotgun at the guy who assesses the money tax. Who would he point it at? The banks, in a pinch. But that’s only when it’s way, far down the line. In the meantime, everybody. Nobody.
One thing I do like about the concept of a prebate is that by being tied it to a legitimate Social Security number, it is not available to illegal workers thus removing the unfair advantage they now have over legal workers subject to current taxes.
You flat/fair taxers have a lot more faith in our congresscritters than I do. They would manage to make both of them even more complicated than what we have now, and I trust that once the genie ie out of the bottle, we will get both a complicated flat rate income tax, and a complicated national sales tax.
If they make it simple, they get fewer campaign contributions, and other favors from those lobbying for special treatment.
No exemption, deduction, credit, or other relief -- this makes the reporting simple and easy.
The government would still have to prosecute offenders (there would be fraud for misreporting, and some failure-to-pay) and it would then be incumbent on the government to prove guilt... not only that, but Jurors could judge the law itself and find someone innocent to negate/vacate a claim the government made against their property as the redress of that violation.
It also applies on the corporate level -- since there are not loopholes, there can be no exploitation thereof by lobbyists.
In other words, by keeping it utterly simple keeps if from fulfilling the following saying:
"when the legislature determines what may be bought and sold, the first things bought and sold are legislators"
This is true; in order to return some powers to the states I should think that a sort of "hold taxes in escrow" that the States could prevent payout on might be desirable -- the problem then becomes one which was fatal to the Articles of Confederation: the federal government having no taxation powers -- so I'm not entirely convinced this is the way to go.
The main thrust I was making is that we could utterly reform our taxation into something which is not an onerous burden and not a progressive tax rather easily.
It would have to have several sections, and be perhaps something like this:
> “Has any tax ever been struck down for multiplicity?”
Yes, one of the income taxes in the latter half of the 19th century was struck down by the Supreme Court. Another income tax of the same era was upheld as a direct tax with apportionment but the apportionment left small farmers paying as much taxes as the wealthy, giving rise to the “disproportionate burden” issue.
The thing to take away from all this is that the FairTax solves these problems completely.
No deduction for wages paid to employees? that’s double taxation.
All the more incentive to have a corporation, which would not be subject to an income tax, though you paying yourself would fall under such taxation.
Yes, it could be abused: have the 'corporation' buy all the equipment (TV, cars, food, etc) you need and pay yourself X.. but that would be pursuable as fraud.
Our state income tax is a flat tax. No deductions other than federal tax paid. I know every year what it will cost me. The amount withheld from my check ends up being within 100$ either way of the amount I owe. Easy, predictable and no moments in April when I find out I owe another 21k.
I personally would welcome either the flat or fair tax. I have often said if the rest of the country paid tax at the rate I do, the second American revolution would start tomorrow.
All the more incentive to have a corporation, which would not be subject to an income tax,
In a previous post, you said this:
“It also applies on the corporate level — since there are not loopholes, there can be no exploitation thereof by lobbyists.”
do you tax corporations or not?
“but that would be pursuable as fraud.:
Who will do the pursuing?
I can see why you’d assume tgey’d go the way of every other tax, but don’t see why they’d be more complicated than the current system, which well nigh approaches the upper limit of complexity. Or maybe there’s plenty territory yet to conquer on the complexity frontier, but we’ve gone pretty damn far. I’d like to know why these would make it worse. What is it that’s holding back “congresscritters” now which flatness and fairness relieve?
I also wonder why critics of either the fair or flat tax always, without fail, argue we’ll end up with both? Why? Because government always ends up taxing us the most ways imaginary? Okay, but that’s true already, right? And we do have an income tax and a VAT tax already. The latter is seldom identified as such. We call it the corporate tax. Guess what? The corporate tax and the income tax were not a packaged deal. Flat and fair taxes can be the same.
I don’t buy into disproportionate burden. The requirement was that direct taxes be apportioned among the states according to population, which gas nothing to do with the tax’s proportion to the taxpayer’s total wealth. That is a red herring, like how they try to add substance to “due process,” which according to common sense and the English language is about process.
Uniformity is a different matter, and disproportionate burden absolutely comes into play. The whiskey tax, for instance, was argued by the Hamiltonians as neutral and unprejudiced toward region or class on the basis that it was the same excise on the same product everywhere in the country. But they knew or should have that out West they used whiskey as currency, and therefore the tax fell disproportionately, was not uniform, and therefore illegal.
Right; by making a flat income tax, applicable to people reviving incomes there is no encumbrance upon corporations -- no complexity in write-offs or qualifiers for "tax-exempt" status (which I think the FedGov wrongly uses to extort churches).
You wrote: “You believe that? How will social security know how much benefit you are accruing if you don’t file something?”
You obviously have not read “The Fairtax Book.” I have read both of them. The first edition and the second edition which Boortz and Linder wrote to debunk the naysayers.
Read the books and then tell me your opinion please. I’m not doing your homework for you. You may even go to the web site: Fairtax.org.
Curring bump. Many credits and deductions survived, and then Bob Dole and other Senate Republicans (Dole was minority leader, then majority leader, for another 10 years after the Tax Reform Act passed) allowed lobbyists to start screwing with the deductions and amortization schedules again, and then Slick got elected and immediately attacked the whole idea, and led us back toward higher marginal "screw-you" rates.
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