Posted on 10/09/2007 5:27:15 AM PDT by Man50D
Ron Petrucci's Sept. 24 letter addressing Charles Firth is right on a number of points. We have been running more than an $800 billion trade deficit. That can't go on for very long. Ron says we're a debtor nation and we are.
Our manufacturing continues to move overseas to "more tax friendly" locations. We can't exist by providing each other services. Picture everyone doing their neighbor's laundry. We need to produce products to exist.
What Ron neglected to say is that the reason for that migration is our tax system. Federal taxes and associated compliance costs comprise an average of 25.9 percent of prices of our goods and services. Imported goods and services arrive at our shores essentially tax-free, because most foreign governments encourage exports by rebating their taxes at their borders. We don't do that.
When we try to sell there, they add their taxes to our prices, so our goods and services end up bearing double taxes. American companies have a raw deal both ways. That's why they have trouble competing.
There is an answer, though in the form of HR 25, The Fair Tax Act. That bill is in the House ways and means committee. It is the most thoroughly researched tax bill ever.
For the second time, a group of noted economists recently wrote a letter to Congress and the president, urging them to pass it and sign it into law.
The bill already has more cosponsors than any other tax bill in 80 years. It is a grass-roots proposal. It will pass only if enough citizens support it and tell their representatives. If passed, the current federal tax system would be replaced by a national retail sales tax applied at the final retail sale and collected by the states.
Net retail prices paid would be about the same. Revenue raised would be about the same. Collecting a sales tax is much more efficient than collecting an income tax, it provides a steady revenue flow and everyone would pay.
It needs to pass now, though, before this president leaves office, because no first-term president will entertain changing the tax system, and Social Security will run out of liquid assets at about the end of the next president's first term.
Check the proposal out at www.fairtax.org
When most of the rest of the world collects less than 28% in corporate taxes, and we collect 39% in federal corporate taxes (excluding another 10-18% for the states), the tax effect is significant.
Add in our onerous business regulations and I would take my manufacturing overseas too.
those are post-tax prices
You would know.
Oh and by the way, since the costs of the S Chapter include paying taxes in inputs to the business, the S Corp does not escape paying taxes.
Maybe you need to talk to the IRS about this and pay a few back taxes.
The only “unbelievably ridiculous” thing is that AFFT doesn’t muzzle you “pitchfork and torch” types for seriously damaging their cause. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Wassamatter,baby, don't you like to be told the truth about your bullheraded stupidity?
Tsk, tsk. Shame on us for telling you the truth.
A free Ginsu?
I may have to rethink this...
Ok, never mind, done, still no sale.
neutral?! HA!
will you tax personal injury judgement contingency fees?
will you tax doctor bills?
will you tax lawyer hourly fees?
will you tax manuel’s grass cutting service?
EVERYTHING will be tacked up onto the final bill of the customer.
You are just talking in circles every time someone shoot you down in flames.
The fair tax scam will destroy retirement income, the fair tax scam will drive up all prices, the fair tax scam will devestate industries as the move offshore. Avoidance will work as it legally has in the past and present.
We know what will happen because we have seen it happen. The prebate is just a bribe to the “useful idiot” who will think this is free money. The prebate will soon have a means test just as night follows day.
nice try, but you can’t read.
go play with your ginsu knife.
I find their tactics are very similar to those of the left: obfuscate, discredit the person whilst ignoring the argument, namecalling, veilled and not so veilled references to the Nazi’s, smearing people’s intelligence and finally, sanity.
you can tell a lot about one’s system by the way it defended and by whom.
they don’t really care as long as it gets passed, and I doubt they care how much of the original survives (if any) as long as they can take credit. ego is paramount.
Now this is rich. Just because we asked some of you a simple question: "Why do you think the income tax is better for America than the FairTax?" we are being painted as scammers. Never mind that only one or two of you has even TRIED to answer the question. Obviously you are ballistic about the FT. Why? Why is it so bad that you would leave the income tax in place? Can you at least answer me that?
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. Major premise for tactics is development of operations that will maintain constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
The real action is in the enemy's reaction. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
Tactics, like life, require that you move with the action."
“Alinski was hated and defamed by powerful enemies, proof that his tactics worked. His simple formula for success ... "Agitate + Antagonize + Educate + Organize".
FT "debate" follows the radical socialist agenda to a "T"
poor baby, xenu cries for you.
No matter you words,
The prebate is still a new and draconian entitlement program.
The fair sales tax scam is still an new intrusion into small business records.
The fair sales tax scam is still turning small business into unpaid tax collectors.
The fair sales tax scam will have the identical effect on medium to large ticket items as with the 1991 luxury tax.
you can’t phrase this debate as either or. It is explicitly not either or. you final post demonstrates the fact these propaganda arguments are going nowhere.
It seems 20 million dollars worth of ecconomists-a-leaping can’t stand to a few citizens simple scrutiny. (hard to say anyone who wastes that kind of money is “smart”)
Said like a person who claims to be running a 200 million dollar business but spends 24 hours a day on this forum sniping at those actually trying to get something done!
Ah, if that were but always true....
1. Taxes
2. Threat of litigation
3. Regulation
4. Union mandated wages
Rule #5 seems to be one of your favorites.
If you have been paying attention to FR threads. You would know there is more manufactureing occuring in the USA than in years past.
much of the manufacturing that moved overseas is human labor intensive jobs. The garment industry has been gone for a long time.
That did not leave because of taxation, it left because it was simply more profitable to pay foreign workers to make the stuff and ship it back to the USA.
This is no different than the California Gold Rush Miners who shipped their laundry to china for cleaning because it was cheeper even when factoring the shipping.
To argue the FairTaxScam is a silver bullet that will fix a non-existent problem is laughable at best. We do not live in the 1900’s any more. Municipal entities give tax breaks all the time but that does not guarantee a corporation will HQ in that place. (see Boeing.)
why would anyone want to be in small business retail after this? they will have to charge a higher price whether or not they have enough profit to make a living. And they’d lose business to the guy across the street who charges a lower price because most of his transactions are “under the table”
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