Took me a while to find it since I forgot who wrote it.

Sales vs income both have their pros and cons, and have been debated to no end by experts. Income taxes have the advantage of being progressive without having to deal with refunds and claims that would occur in sales based taxes.

Taxes aren’t my speciality, but I would love to have what is due to Ceasar taken out before I cash my check and be done with it.

No April 15 madness, no records to keep, no playing games and hiring CPAs. Just leave it to IRS and employer to figure out my rate based on family size and a couple other criteria and forget about it.

Evaluating employment opportunities is a simple matter of two pieces of info–my salary and my rate–which at most takes a minute to figure out with paper and pencil. That I’d like to see and experience.

So those who don’t work for their income don’t get taxed. great.

I lived in Austin during the runup and transition.

I think it is an either or, not both proposition. I was trying to use a “progressive” flat-tax model based on income as a means to adjust for poverty and family size. But as in the case of Texas, the sales tax is the simplest of all–everyone, but the tax-exempt pays equally.

Off the top of my head, a sales-based national tax given our current revenues/expenditures would drop by 1/2 from the 18-20% for income-based taxes.

I am all for abolishing the ‘progressive’ income tax. I think it might put some CPAs out of business, so they’ll be against it for sure. I’d like it to be replaced by a FLAT national sales tax, meaning everything is taxed the same, except food.

In the state where I live (Texas), we have a statewide sales tax and no income tax. We also have property taxes which are eating our lunches right now because “it’s for the children”, or in other words, the schools cannot manage their money properly and are begging for more. Don’t get me started on that one. lol

In Texas, we have a ‘tax free weekend’, which is right before school starts and when parents will flock to the malls to buy their children school clothes. Texas does not tax basic groceries, either. For example, they do not tax milk, but they do tax candy bars. The tax on a yacht is the same as the tax on a $15 dollar bracelet at the mall, 8.25%. A small price to pay to keep the state gov’t out of our incomes.

I think that its important to understand that Republicans are not opposed to paying taxes, we just do not want to pay exuberant taxes! I really feel that in Texas we have found a happy medium between tax payers and the gov’t. I understand that Tennesse and Florida do not have incomes taxes, either.

Also, an interesting side note. The Texas governor before GWB was Ann Richards, a Democrat. She proposed to the legislature a state income tax, and then Texans decided to launch GWB’s political career by ousting her and electing him to the governorship. Taxes is a very powerful issue!

I think it is workable if we talk primarily about a flat tax on income only, with no/min deductions. The funds will be collected as they are now, via payroll witholding.

Other ways of tweaking the flat tax can be something on the order of adjusting the percentage rate based on family size or moving the taxable threshold higher–better methinks. Establishing the percentage rate/taxable threshold would be determined by the IRS in advance of payroll deductions, then monitored/reviewed/revised on as needed basis or annually as warranted.

The sales tax is a totally different thing and needs to be evaluated on its own demerits. Bottomline, I don’t see why we need an army of bottomfeeders to process the collection of taxes and the thousands of pages of tangled tax codes. “Keep it short, simple & sweet, stupid”.

Imagine the ads, Republicans want to raise the tax rates for the poor and lower the taxes for the rich. I’ll be frank, there will be no IRS when pigs fly and mules sire rhinos.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39762

It’s absurd. Necessities, they say, won’t be taxed because the government will create some sort of rebate scheme to kick back the cost of them. Duh! Where do you draw the line between hamburger and cavier or between a second-hand denium jacket and new fur? How about Alaska versus Arkansas or a big city versus a farm town or perhaps a very cold winter driving up heating costs or someone who has to drive 50 miles to a job with rising gas prices and thus taxes. Result, multiplying exceptions and adjustments managed by a huge bureaucracy and regulations a mile long. Bad as it is, the IRS is better.

And the bit about VAT growing the economy is ridiculous. Europe has long had VATs and their economies are in a chronic mess. And for many services, VAT evasion is rampant. In France I went with a friend to rent a rototiller. There were two prices. Cash and no receipt was far cheaper than with VAT-creating paperwork. Result, virtually every American will get corrupted in a way the income tax never did and taxes on the honest will have to be far higher to make up for the cheaters. And the cheating will be a few dollars here and there all the time rather than one large sum. That’ll be far harder to enforce. What government wants to spend $10,000 prosecuting a $50 sale done off the books, a sale that might be very hard to prove.

And checks for everyone from the government each month to equal the tax paid on necessities? If that won’t create a huge boondogle and a giant bureacracy, what will? Fake birth certificates anyone? How about government inspectors that raid all of us, checking for cheats like they do people on welfare? (”You mean I can’t claim my cat as a dependent?”) One little slip filing your rebate paperwork, and you’re a criminal in the eyes of what will be a newer and nastier IRS. Then there’s lost rebate checks, forged checks, stolen checks, rent payments missed because a check went astray. I could go on. It makes no sense for the government to take with one hand (the VAT) and give it back with the other (the rebate). The IRS is much more efficient. It takes from employers in one big gulp and doles back the money one check a year.

It isn’t hard to see where this is going. Taxes will be simple and low for those who were always rich enough to afford a CPA. And since they invest (rather than spend) more money and spend more of it outside the US, their taxes will drop quite a bit.

But poor, single working moms will now need a tax lawyer to do the paperwork to get their rebates right. And the VAT won’t apply to what businesses buy, just poor working stiffs who have to feed their family. Imagine a tax-free business lunch for execs in a fancy restaurant while a carpenter sitting on a trash can pays a hefty tax on his bologna sandwitch.

Last but not least, a politican who believes that businesses will pass along their tax savings is a fool. Business will do what the did in Europe when the Euro allowed them to hide price increases. A few execs will pocket the enlarged profits and the price of everything will rise by the tax rate and more.

That, in fact, may be the point of all this. Not all the Democrat stereotypes about the Republicans being the party of ‘fat cats’ are wrong. Look at how eager some Republicans are to excuse Bill Gates and his nasty business practices? If Democrats publicy treat wealth as evil, all too many Republican politicians treat it as a measure of virtue.

Worst of all, this will put 200+ million Americans into a serf-like dependency, living from month to month, waiting their government rebate check to arrive just like welfare moms. We’ll have a giant headache as politicians compete to see who can up that rebate the most at the expense of our national debt.

A century ago, a ’single tax’ on land was the moonshine of tax reformers. More recently, it was “going back to the gold standard.” Now it is replacing the IRS for a VAT. Duh! How are you going to save money by substituting a bureaucracy tracking a single or double income per household with one tracking hundreds of sales transactions each year?

The Republicans have just given the Democrats a big campaign issue, if they’re bright enough to use it. To give but one example. Here is Washington, I already pay a sales tax that’s over 8%. This idea would push it to 31%. Paying 1/3 of the cost of everything I buy as taxes will not, as WND claims, “be immensely popular with voters.” They’ll seeth with fury every time they go to the grocery store. And when they return home, there will be Democratic ads on TV blaming it all on the Republicans.

Alas, this fits perfectly with a four-word description of American politics: “Democrats evil. Republicans stupid.” Here the Republicans are being unusually stupid, look for the Democrats to get unusually nasty about it.

–Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

And besides, what will happen to all the public schools who teach evolution and marxism, and what will happen to all the abortion clinics? Planned Parenthood will be out of business. Amen!!

They better go this route. And then we can put that disemboweled little girl on TV and ask her what she thinks of “ambulance chasers.”

This was a serious subject of past campaigns. This is not new by any stretch. It was a serious subject of the Republican primary in 2000. What you have is a presidency that has been involved in the biggest restructuring since WWII. It’s called the Homeland Security Department. We are also engaged in two front war overseas. That kind of puts the brakes on any new initiatives as will this latest intelligence overhaul. I think it’s politically dead. What’s he going to do, put the CPA’s out of work as an election ploy? Take away corporate tax breaks in a soft job market? This is much more likely to be an issue in the 2006 Congressional elections. The Republicans have never been able to agree on whether we needed a sales or VAT tax. These can be quite different depending on how business is treated. In some cases business don’t pay sales tax. It’s quite complicated. If this comes up it will be a part of a budget plan to privatize a portion of Social Security. You really can’t talk about one without the other I don’t think. It is one way to take care of corporate welfare though. Then there is the question of how to treat mortgage interest. So Bush is going to talk about home ownership in record numbers and then take away the interest deduction? I think not.

Tort reform is the issue they need to pound home, especially with an ambulance chaser as an opponent for VP.

Canadians threw out the government that brought in the GST, it was and is such a despised tax. Then a lot of politicians campaigned on promises that they would get rid of the GST. But whenever any of them got elected, they broke their promises.

So now, we just accept the GST as an unpleasant fact of life. We are reminded of it whenever we make a purchase …

Hope you are not heading down the same route.