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.
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.