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To: Principled
How a refund redistributes wealth???? How dumb is that...

It isn't a refund. As the legislation is written, it is a government handout, whose value is set by an unelected bureaucracy (based on an arbitrary "poverty level" value). Your lies and ad hominem attacks do nothing to change those facts.

Some places you say that it would be better to simply exempt certain items rather than refund the tax on necessites. What's the difference?

The difference is that the "refund" has nothing to do with the amount of tax paid, and could easily (by manipulation of the arbitrary "poverty level" value) be used as an instrument of wealth redistribution. The worst that making some items "tax free" could do would be to allow them to be purchased without any government influence. There is no way that government can give money out of the treasury to certain political groups via not charging taxes, and that is something that the "prebate" system certainly WILL do. The moment after legislation like this is implemented, there would be scores of "poverty pimps" insisting that the poverty level is too low and the "prebate" value needs to be set to a higher value. And since, as the legislation is currently written, the only thing necessary to modify that poverty value, and associated government handout value, is a statement of that fact by the bureaucracy published in the Federal Register. A leftist secretary of the HHS could implement communism with this system as easily as a leftist secretary of the treasury was able to ban certain shotguns, merely by the stroke of a pen.

Why would you want or need to have government in control of what "necessities" are... that's the difference you desire.

It isn't what I desire, it is what I merely find preferable to a system that would allow government handouts (of any value desired by a future administration) to every household in the U.S.

Ignorant or purposefully misleading- I have no use for either

Then stop being ignorant or purposely misleading. Either you are ignorant of the facts surrounding the flaws in the currently proposed system, or you are being deliberately misleading and you have some ulterior motive in establishing the mechanisms of socialism that the proposed legislation would mandate. Since you have already shown your willingness to be misleading (claiming that I have advocated marxism and an income tax just because I oppose a socialist redistribution system that is even worse), it is unclear as to exactly which sin you are guilty.
959 posted on 11/11/2002 5:30:28 PM PST by Technogeeb
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To: Technogeeb
The federal government decides to stop taxing necessities and you say that's "redistribution"?

LOL

977 posted on 11/11/2002 8:12:40 PM PST by Principled
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To: Technogeeb

There is no way that government can give money out of the treasury to certain political groups via not charging taxes

Certainly government cand when the government defines what it decides are "necessities" controlling what is taxed, thereby controlling who is taxed.

In the specific case burdening purchasers of certain "luxury" items with higher tax rates to the favor of those burdened with no tax rate by virtue of what they consume as government declared "necessity".

To use your own tunnel vision understanding of the unitlateral power of bureaucrats to implement there own regulations, a bureaucrat decides that yachts are a necessity for the right of locomotion and mobility to go where one will at ones own choice. Upheld by the courts to be a clear constitutional right, refer early Civil Rights cases.

On the otherhand it is not a clear constitutional right to purchase McDonalds hambugers unfettered as healthier substitutes are available.

The yacht owners(providing tranport out of an angry nation for a very unpopular bureaucrat) thus receive a clear advantage in the distribution of tax burden at the expense of the many McDonald hamburger gluttons.

Overall there is less money in the treasury, since yachts are no longer taxed and a specific group, yacht owners, have more money in their pocket by virtue of not paying a tax.

If that isn't redistribution by differential application of a tax code, I don't know what is.

984 posted on 11/11/2002 9:39:44 PM PST by ancient_geezer
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