A new and simple way to tax

a reply to: macman

Thank you for offering an alternative.

"No one group, regardless of what they earn, should be carrying the weight for others. "
I agree, but until wage disparity is somewhat mitigated we are kind of stuck.

With the flat tax at 5%, we just go further into debt as a nation. Washington DC has proven time and time again they will spend what they want, regardless of what money they have.

The problem I have with a consumption tax is that consumption is actually greater for the poor than it is for the wealthy.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.

Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years.

A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

www.goodreads.com...

The biggest trap with broaching a new tax regime is that it wont replace the old system but get added too the old system.

Lots of farmers and consumers back in 1913 wanted the income tax as a way to replace the Tariff on imported technology. The Tariff made farmers pay high prices to protect US industry while at the same time receiving low bids on the world food market.

As it turned out, now they pay the Tariff and the income tax.