Posted on 11/06/2002 1:39:57 PM PST by Tree of Liberty
Neil Cavuto just interviewed Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., the director of the OMB, and Neil let it be known that he's hearing rumblings that Pres. Bush is considering a total re-write of the tax code and that SecTreas O'Neill is strongly pushing a national retail sales tax!
I would suggest you both tone down your rhetoric and hyperbole.
I will expose a person's intent to deceive readers where I find it, thank you very much. See post 904.
I would suggest you both cool off for abit and approach your issues with abit less heat and more clearity of the reason instead of blinding emotional attachment to your own particular personal views.
I will not cater to a person that has been exposed for their intent to deceive. That's an honest principle. If you want to compromise honest principle that's your choice. Just as it is each person's choice of whether to vote for the lesser of evils that always begets evil. You do your thing, I'll do mine. Know this, I will not cater to those that are dishonest. Seldom will I cater to a person that chooses to cater to persons that are dishonest, especially when they ask me to compromise honest principles.
You seek to enlist government agents to initiate force against certain persons on your behalf
Clearly, we are both doing this. That’s what taxes are all about. This comment does not distinguish your pov from mine.
Taxation is necessary to gain revenue but honest principle, integrity, honoring and protecting individual life-and-property rights are primary.
Agree.
All those [words] in bold, [above], are violated when taxes are imposed greater on one group than another.
Disagree both to the correctness of this statement and to the implication that my preferred tax structure seeks to impose greater taxes on one group than another whereas yours does not.
[Your pov] sacrifices a portion of the individual for the supposed betterment of the group. It is collectivist groupthink.
Completely wrong. [Note: The rest of your diatribe is boilerplate hyperbole much of which I agree with if I ignore your hyperbolic delivery of it.]
Underlying your position are the following two assumptions:
1. a flat tax on the base of retail sales and a zero tax on all other economic activity is appropriate, but a flat tax on retail sales and a much smaller, miniscule tax on financial transactions unfairly disadvantages the latter group.
2. the only way to measure the appropriateness of the tax burden is % of income or % of retail consumption. If either of these percents is flat, no further inquiry is necessary; if they are not, no free market justification is possible.
Before continuing, are you aware that I am challenging the above two assumptions? Do you want to understand why or would you rather manufacture your own explanation so that you can stick your tounge out, put your thumbs in your ears, wiggle your fingers while labeling my challenge “collectivist groupthink mentality?”
I agree that government protects both life and property. I have not supported a flat tax on wealth. For one thing it is too difficult to measure. If it could be, I would favor a declining wealth tax.
Just because we can't measure accurately, that doesn't prevent us from recognizing that the wealthy pay a much smaller % of wealth
Deuce: Because I don't favor changing the distribution of the tax burden from what it is now to one which increases it for the middle class---the class to which, I, an individual belong? 908
Either you want to keep the tax burden the same as it is now or put the tax burden on the low income and below poverty level income people.
Disagree both to the correctness of this statement and to the implication that my preferred tax structure seeks to impose greater taxes on one group than another whereas yours does not.
You said in your last post (908) you don't want to shift the tax burden from where it is now. As it is now it violates honest principle, integrity, honoring and protecting individual life-and-property rights. That you fail to see that is your problem -- not mine. Therefore I have no desire or need to continue this discussion. You may have the last word.
1. a flat tax on the base of retail sales and a zero tax on all other economic activity is appropriate, but a flat tax on retail sales and a much smaller, miniscule tax on financial transactions unfairly disadvantages the latter group.
A minsicule tax? The Tobin tax is a compounding tax roundrobin transactions, most of which yield no profit to either side of the transaction, but the are mere movement of cash from one account to another through the processes involved in of payment of debts and conduct of commerce between individuals and nations.
At 0.5% the compounding Tobin tax places $360 Trillion dollar burden on the financial sector of the World economy.
That Tobin Tax is indeed a very severe burden on a minority group of individuals engaging in the cash transactions necessary for the conduct of modern commerce.
http://www.europarl.eu.int/workingpapers/econ/107_en.htm#chap3
Table 1: Simple annualised effective Tobin Tax rates for differing turn-around periods, assuming constant exchange rates (see also " Calculating equivalent annual tax rates"
Nominal Tax rate (%) Effective Tax rate (annual %) 1 day/ trading day* 1 week 1 month 3 months 1 year 10 years 0.01 7.3/4.8 1.04 0.24 0.08 0.02 0.002 0.05 36.5/24.0 5.2 1.2 0.4 0.1 0.01 0.1 73/48.0 10.4 2.4 0.8 0.2 0.02 0.15 109.5/72.0 15.6 3.6 1.2 0.3 0.03 0.2 148/96.0 20.8 4.8 1.6 0.4 0.04 0.25 182.5/120.0 26.0 6.0 2.0 0.5 0.05 0.5 365/240 52.0 12.0 4.0 1.0 0.1 1.0 730/480 104.0 24.0 8.0 2.0 0.2 * As formulated by Tobin, the annualised rate was calculated on the basis of what a round-trip would cost if carried out every day, on the basis of 240 trading days in the year.
The main purpose of the Tobin Tax is to control world economic activity(i.e. manage economies socialist style) from the proponents of the Tobin Tax:
http://www.europarl.eu.int/workingpapers/econ/107_en.htm#intro
Introduction I.
The first formal proposal for a tax on spot transactions involving the conversion of one currency into another was made by the US Nobel prize-winning economist, Professor James Tobin, in a lecture at Princeton University in 1972(1). He further developed the concept in his Presidential Address to the Eastern Economic Association in 1978, which was subsequently published in the Eastern Economic Journal(2).
Since then, the introduction of what has become known as a "Tobin Tax" has at regular intervals figured on the political agenda. The idea of "throwing some sand in the well-greased wheels of international finance" has had a special appeal at times of turbulence on world financial markets.
A Tobin Tax would be levied on foreign exchange transactions at a uniform, but low, ad valorem rate. Prof. Tobin himself suggested rates of 0.2%, 0.5% and 1%. Current French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin suggested 0.1% in 1995, " qui ne pénaliserait pas les investissements à dix ans mais les placements à dix jours"(3).
Were the transaction the consequence of long-term investment, indeed, such a levy would constitute a negligible extra cost to the total project. However, were the transaction to be a short-term speculation, involving movements in and out of a particular currency in a matter of weeks, days or hours, it could constitute a significant charge, and "increase the risk of foreign exchange loss"(4).
A Tobin Tax would serve a number of objectives:
- In so far as short-term, speculative transactions have a destabilising effect on currency markets (see next section), a fall in the volume of such transactions would reduce exchange-rate volatility. This, in turn, would improve the financial climate for "real" trade in goods and services.
- The tax would also serve to put a "fiscal buffer" between economies. A government whose exchange rate was under threat would need to raise short-term interest rates by less in order to defend a particular parity than would otherwise be the case. The potentially damaging effect on growth and employment would consequently be reduced.
- The tax would also, of course, raise revenue - perhaps some $360,000,000,000 a year world-wide, based on a 0.5% rate and $1 trillion foreign exchange market turnover during each of 240 trading days(5). Prof. Tobin's suggestion was that this should be paid into a central fund controlled by the IMF or the World Bank, so providing considerable extra resources for international stability programmes.
The levying of a Tobin Tax would also, however, present some daunting problems.
- There would need to be agreement on its application in every financial centre in the world - otherwise foreign exchange markets would move to "tax-free" jurisdictions. The problems of introducing a withholding tax on interest even within the EU alone do not augur well for the chances of such an international agreement.
- Levying the tax on an estimated $1 to 1.5 trillion turnover a day would be a massive administrative task, even if the effect of the tax was to reduce the total. Turnover in the foreign exchanges in a month is roughly equivalent to the value of world-wide trade in a year.
- There would also be considerable problems in defining:
- the tax base (would market interventions by central banks, or transaction between other governmental or international bodies, be covered? Would it also cover "beneficial" trading by market makers, or financial intermediaries providing stabilising liquidity? ); and
- taxable transactions (a tax on foreign currency transactions alone could be avoided through the derivatives markets).
- It is not even certain that a Tobin Tax would increase exchange-rate stability. When a currency was under attack by speculators, the cost of the tax would almost certainly already have been discounted, possibly resulting in greater, rather than lower, volatility. A Tobin Tax would have had little effect in preventing the fall of the Mexican peso in early 1995, for example, nor that of the S.E. Asian currencies in 1997.
Discussions in the European Parliament
The European Parliament's Subcommittee on Monetary Affairs last held in-depth discussions on the Tobin Tax and related issues on 6 October, 1993. A public hearing on International Monetary Cooperation within the Framework of the Easing of Restrictions on Capital Markets considered, among other contributions, seven papers from outside experts, together with a paper from Sub-Committee Chairman, Christa Randzio-Plath. These were subsequently published by the Directorate-General for Research (Economic Series W-12/rev., January 1994).
Some of these papers made reference to the Tobin Tax proposals, though most only briefly. As in the case of the paper presented by the Chair, a tax was seen as one of two possible mechanisms to limit speculation, the other being to require purchasers of foreign currency against domestic currency to place a certain percentage of those purchases in the form of non-interest-bearing deposits with the appropriate central bank. Unlike the Tobin Tax, there has been some practical experience of this latter mechanism: it was, for example, used by the Spanish Government during the September 1992 EMS crisis.
The experts were heavily against either a tax or special deposits, which were seen as a form of re-introduced control on capital movements. This, as the executive summary noted,
"would penalize the development of the financial markets, which represented a significant share of the most highly developed European states' GDP. This would also represent a step backwards in terms of the achievement of the Single Market..."
Some of the spontaneous contributions during the hearing, however, were less hostile to limited restrictions on capital movements. A number considered that solutions might be sought to the practical problems of introducing a Tobin Tax. The broad conclusions of the hearing were that much stronger international cooperation in the economic and monetary field was required:
"The stability of the world economy could be improved by international cooperation, specifically by the creation of a global monetary system, a global supervision framework, a global taxation system and a global trade rationalisation agreement"(6).
In such a context, it is indeed possible that a Tobin Tax would become feasible.
Yes, post 904, where you claim that a calculation based on an arbitrary "poverty level" is a safeguard instead of the flaw it quite clearly is, and called my pointing out your intellectual folly "dishonest" and "failed character development".
You erroneously claim it is arbitrary. It's not arbitrary. (arbitrary: Based on or subject to individual discretion or preference or sometimes impulse or caprice) As I wrote in post 904:
"According to your "logic" they can do whatever they want [arbitrary]. Thus they can do whatever they want with your preferred plan too. For with any plan you propose they can simply say the _______ (fill in the blank) level is __________ (fill in the blank). For example, they can simply say a 99% income tax will be withheld from all paychecks where the person's annual income level is $10,000 or more." 904
But I have digressed to catering to you. Not to worry, I'll get over it.
You demonstrated your intent to deceive the reader. Thus rendering yourself not to be trusted or respected because you disrespect the reader. You probably think you can mislead and try to deceive the reader and that they should just comply with you and answer your questions or take you seriously. You deserve no person's attention in a discussion. Scorn. That's what you deserve.
"According to your "logic" they can do whatever they want [arbitrary]. Thus they can do whatever they want with your preferred plan too. For with any plan you propose they can simply say the _______ (fill in the blank) level is __________ (fill in the blank). For example, they can simply say a 99% income tax will be withheld from all paychecks where the person's annual income level is $10,000 or more." 904
making claims of "tinfoil" like you did in post 917.
techongeeb: allows a single individual (and an unelected one at that) the ability to convert the economy of the United States into a communistic one.
Is tinfoil as anyone who reviews 917 will readily perceive. Your continuence does disservice to your position, which as I said ,I could agree with in principle provided there be no exemptions of taxation on retail goods or services at all.
Your insistance of letting the government define what should be tax free as opposed to taxed goods undermines any concept of individual liberty to express such choices for himself in light of his personal circumstance, and opens the door to special interest manipulation of whole sectors of the economy through differential tax law, as is done today.
"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."
- KEYES TRANSCRIPT (01/28/02)
The Honorable James DeMint (R-SC)
United States House of RepresentativesTHURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2001
12:00 noon"In 1996, Congress passed a historic welfare reform law that has dramatically reduced the number of Americans who depend on welfare. In spite of this positive development, Representative DeMint is concerned about the steady growth of a welfare/entitlement state that extends well beyond the poor and is forcing millions of middle income Americans into dependency.
There has been a shift in the relationship between individuals and government, he argues, such that fewer and fewer are paying taxes at the same time that more and more are receiving increasingly generous benefits. If it becomes the case that most voters do not bear a financial burden for this largess, then there will be little to restrain--and significant political incentives to encourage--the continued growth of government. And at that point, DeMint warns, we have reached a major crisis in our democracy."
That is the problem of "democracy" vs the representative republic we should be.
Everyone must perceive the financial burden of government largess equally without special exception or we perpetuate the ills of the current income/payroll tax system that allows the translation of tax burden from one group at the expense of other groups and there disenfranchisement in the political process through the distortions of perception of a free ride by the sectors that receive the most largess from government.
The complaint and demand of our forefathers in establishing this nation was addressing "Taxation without Representation", not a demand for Representation without taxation.
To remove taxation from the perception of the individual, is to remove the goad which assures accountability of government to the electorate. Federal tax rates are high because a majority of the electorate do not share proportionately in the burden their demand for largesse imposes on the minority of citizens.
The siren call for Representation without Taxation is the formula that got us where we are at today. The ability to hide or disguise taxation from the view of large sectors of the electorate allows the Congress to get away with the creation of the evergrowing monster that it fosters.
My position is either FCA or no exemption at all. But only the purist and most dogmatic demands that one dispose of the good, or retain the bad, to support the purity of personal ideology.
Your source says $360 billion, which is a reasonable number.
That Tobin Tax is indeed a very severe burden on a minority group of individuals engaging in the cash transactions necessary for the conduct of modern commerce.
The unproductive financial sector of the US took $650 billion out of the economy last year. That’s about three times what the auto industry gets from producing 30 million cars. Furthermore, they require one anti-free enterprise special privilege after another in order to achieve this result. That, alone, should make you realize the unproductive character of this actiuvity. Somehow, you have become convinced, however, that they are providing a service “necessary for the conduct of modern commerce.”
I do not deny that such a tax would curtail a significant portion of what currently takes place. That is because the value to many of these transactions is virtually nil. Some of the activity will be curtailed, while the rest of it will be taxed. I’m fine with that.
Your attempt to equate the folly of the two systems is nonsensical.
It seems that you think members of congress are so honest that they wouldn't create a Bill and pass it to implement a graduated income tax; and that it would only ever put a tax burden on the highest incomes of a merger 1% income tax; and that congress is so honest that it wouldn't raise that rate to 40% for the highest incomes and roughly 33% for middle incomes and roughly 25% for lower incomes; and that members congress are so honest that they won't continue raising the income tax rates beyond those amounts. Or that members of congress are so honest that they wouldn't create 20,000 gun laws, most of which violate the U.S. constitution. The list of how frequently members of congress violate their oath of office is very long indeed. The HHS has a long track record of using honest calculations to determine the poverty level, certainly far more honest than how members of congress trash the U.S. constitution to the harm of all citizens. However, members of congress could start to correct their frauds by passing HR2525.
But I have digressed to catering to you. Not to worry, I'll get over it.
You demonstrated your intent to deceive the reader. Thus rendering yourself not to be trusted or respected because you disrespect the reader. You probably think you can mislead and try to deceive the reader and that they should just comply with you and answer your questions or take you seriously. You deserve no person's attention in a discussion. Scorn. That's what you deserve.
Just because we can't measure accurately, that doesn't prevent us from recognizing that the wealthy pay a much smaller % of wealth
You may imangine that, however the problem is the wealthy actually do pay a larger % in regard to wealth than the poor do as indicated by the BLM numbers using value of home as a proxy for wealth:
For evidence of this I refer you again to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics File you pointed out to me in your search for distribution of taxes by income for the year 2000,
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2000/income.txt
and once again I bring your attention to the case of the less than $5,000, average income of $1,942 with an expenditure of $17,946 owning a $40,008 home.
| Income | less than $5,000 |
5,000 to 9,999 |
10,000 to 14,999 |
15,000 to 19,999 |
20,000 to 29,999 |
30,000 to 39,999 |
40,000 to 49,999 |
50,000 to 59,999 |
greater than 60,000 |
|
| Gross Income |
1,942 | 7,192 | 12,245 | 17,070 | 23,666 | 32,720 | 41,498 | 54,432 | 102,578 | |
| Expenditure | 17,946 | 15,703 | 21,199 | 24,331 | 29,852 | 35,609 | 42,323 | 49,245 | 75,964 | |
| Personal Taxes |
39 | 447 | 71 | 248 | 861 | 1,702 | 2,703 | 4,128 | 10,008 | |
| OwnedHome Value |
$40,008 | $38,335 | $51,671 | $60,981 | $60,417 | $68,825 | 80,089 | 102,153 | 185,009 | |
| Tax as % of Home value |
0.097% | 1.1% | 0.14% | 0.4% | 1.4% | 2.45% | 3.3% | 4.0% | 5.4% |
The Highlited row contains my calculations of (100*PersonalTax/HomeValue) based on the BLM numeric values published for those values.
Once again, you provide only your personal opinion of what you want to believe rather than demonstrate it for us from any fundamental basis.
Your assertions are mere repetition of your own dogmatic belief, in spite of strong and clear evidence in counter to what you want us to accept on the basis of your mere words. Opinions no matter how forcefully repeatedly one my try to express them remain only opinions. Such repetition ultimately becomes the refuge of the demogogue pushing a personal agenda, not the rational person seeking facts and truth on which to base conclusions to base action in.
Is tinfoil as anyone who reviews 917 will readily perceive.
No, it is merely the truth. A single individual (the secretary of HHS, who is an unelected bureaucrat) would have the ability to convert the economy of the United States into a communistic one. Under the plan, he could do so merely by adjusting the value of the "poverty level", a power that the secretary already has, and would continue to have under the plan.
Your insistance of letting the government define what should be tax free as opposed to taxed goods
That is a power that the government has under the excise power of the Constitution, and it is certainly preferable to creating a system that gives every household in the US a government handout.
and opens the door to special interest manipulation of whole sectors of the economy through differential tax law, as is done today.
While perhaps not ideal, such a system would still be preferable to the current one (in which people purchasing certain goods can not only not pay taxes on those goods, but actually get a "tax credit", i.e., handout from the government, just for purchasing the item). And such a system is definitely preferable to the socialism that the "prebate" mechanism would enshrine into law.
My position is either FCA or no exemption at all
I could agree with no exemption at all. But the FCA as it is currently proposed is horribly flawed, and certainly worse than just declaring that certain goods (food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc) are not taxed. The idea that consumers won't have to pay a tax on certain goods doesn't seem that bad to me (several states already do that with the sales tax laws; the effects are generally known and not that bad); especially when the alternative is to create a socialist system of government "prebate" handouts to every household in the United States.
Your source says $360 billion,
I stand corrected, that is their reported figure:
which is a reasonable number.
In regard to a differential burden placed on a small sector of the people. I would beg to differ that that is a reasonable burden on the folks who have to pay it and the planning, accounting, litigation overhead that goes along with it.
I hope you have seen this problem
As well as they do. Not even counting the overhead burden imposed on the individual, the administrative costs in collect the tax imposed a larger tax burden on everyone, if their figure of $360billion worldwide is not a net figure after administrative costs to government taken out of gross Tobin revenues received.
Our current economy stands at 8 Trillion per year, that provides at least 12 Times that figure, $96Trillion as a US Tobin tax base, (The US has cash transaction flow much larger than any other economy in the world thust the factor of 12 is quite conservative)
Appling a Tobin tax of 0.5% to the more than $96 Trillion transaction flow, yields $480 billion burden on the US alone, the arithmetic of the source leaves a little to be desired. They appear to be prone to understatement of the negatives to their proposals.
I suspect the $360billion quoted by the euro & world government folks, is actually a net figure after costs of collecting and administering the tax are removed from the gross tax revenue collected. Even then, based on US experience the overhead experienced by the private sector in such taxes adds 65% of the gross collection to the total burden on the economy.
Your "minisule" tax is anything but "miniscule" in regard to anyone, much less the small minority of persons you propose to impose it on in addition to an NRST.
The unproductive financial sector of the US took $650 billion out of the economy last year.
And a tax on this "unproductive" sector ,that is also very necessary for the conduct of orderly commerce, is not going to increase the burden on the economy? I think not, the expessed purpose of the tax is to control and slow down financial activity. You figure the economy is not affected by controls on flow of funds through it. I suggest you take a good refresure course in economics if you believe that. Assuming of course that you have ever been exposed such a course in your experience.
Moving the finances in payment of production, may termed "unproductive" in terms of manufacturing. Its loss to the economy and ability to deliver payment for goods and services would be of great negative impact to any economy.
I do not deny that such a tax would curtail a significant portion of what currently takes place.
Transfer of payments for goods services and debt service.
That is because the value to many of these transactions is virtually nil.
Tell that to those looking for a loan individuals and corporate, or needing capital to start or grow a business, or those wanting payment for their goods and service from their customers.
Some of the activity will be curtailed, while the rest of it will be taxed. I’m fine with that.
Spoken as a true socialist.
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