Beware the Flat Tax Sales Pitch
source: http://bit.ly/5hxF6L
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- NankinYP
- added this
Here's an excerpt of what he has to say:
"Let’s be clear about what a flat tax would do. We currently have a progressive income tax, which means your effective tax rate (calculated as tax burden divided by income) increases as your income increases. Changing this progressive tax to a flat tax would cut taxes for the wealthy and raise taxes on the poor and middle class. I’m not editorializing here. By definition that is what would happen. Flat tax proponents don’t dispute this--they just choose to not mention it.
This is why I question Watt’s assertion that the flat tax “should form one of the central tenets of any prospective GOP platform on social justice." How raising taxes on the poor and middle class equates to social justice is beyond me. And if he means to only cut taxes on the rich and not increase taxes on the poor, this, of course, would lead to huge deficits, which if translated into budget cuts would also fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class."
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- groups:
- Community, Current Republicans
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- tags:
- GOP, Poor, Social Justice, Middle Class, 4 more
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Saladin
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Nothing about decentralizing the economy and ending the Fed STOPS that kind of behavior Mike. That's the whole point.
Eliminating power simply creates a power vacuum, even before central banking corporatism and economic oppression could run free.
The answer is Teddy Roosevelt's "big stick." It means ensuring that people can't monopolize markets or treat their workers like shit and that bribing the Federal Government is a felony crime or, better yet, treason.
Civilization is a project, not a tool. The existence of infrastructure is supposed to bring humankind together to a common end, not separate us into stratas too obsessed with our own toys to care about one another.
The capitalism you envision, trained and hardworking people making their own wealth and selling that wealth on the marketplace, it's never existed. It's an idealized model based on economic concepts that work in theory but never actually happen.
Assuming a market will be in perfect competition automatically with no barriers to entry or exit is like doing a physics equating assuming no air resistance or friction, there's practically nothing in existence that acts like that.
You need rules to ensure those conditions, not even you disagree with that, you just call it "force and fraud."
The entire debate is not over whether or not to have rules, it's how to define force and fraud. The only difference between you and people left of you is what we consider to be force and fraud.
I consider usury to be fraud. I consider subprime mortgages and other market manipulations to be fraud.
The economic discussion between left and right is not between "liberty" and "planning," it's between what freedoms make our economy thrive and what freedoms fuck everything up.
- 2 years ago
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Saladin
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shanklinmike
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The goal is to cut government, the flat tax is just an ideal out there to do so, but in essence, the government needs to take in less money from both the rich AND the poor. Almost everything that occurs today is socialism for the rich in one form or another, and the more money you throw at an inefficient Federal monopoly the more incentives for lobbyists, special interests, and rent seekers(public choice theory version). I strive for a freer society, that requires minimizing the coercive and corporate protectionist state as well!
After watching this video you tell me, who is the terrorist?.....government IS the ultimate terrorist that we have just become accustomed towards. We have been desensitized to believe that we are serfs to the state, but we are actually all worth more than just pawns to the central planners!
- 2 years ago
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shanklinmike
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diabolical44
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a flat tax is all well and good as an idea on paper. kind of like communism. Ideally, it seems like a fair and just way to operate as a nation. everything is fair and square , right? wrong. In practice it doesn't work because we all know that the super rich hardly pay any taxes on their real income. they have tons of ways of fudging the numbers and hiding income and offshore safe havens etc etc.... maybe if you could close all the loopholes it could work. but we all know the GOP would hardly push for that.
- 2 years ago
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diabolical44
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Saladin
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The Flat Tax has always been bullshit.
It's utterly nonsensical, there's nothing fair about it since no one is actually paying the same amount of income.
- 2 years ago
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Saladin
