Federal Taxes. Your Opinion?

[bertha katzenengel]

[Demeter]

1. How About "Taxes Are Imperative--We Need to Pay Our Bills!"

and that means the rich who ordered up this buffet of blood and tears are going to have to pay for it.

[trotsky]

2. Another vote for THAT option.

Progressive taxation, the more progressive the better.

[TechBear_Seattle]

7. Agree entirely. Flat tax is BAD for most people n/t

[ProfessorGAC]

12. For Nearly Everyone

If one looks at the FAIR tax proposal, it looks like it would benefit a pretty sizeable chunk of people. The problem is the math doesn't work out very well, and the consumption tax would have to be WAY(!) higher, in order to maintain revenue neutrality. So, then it turns out that it would only benefit those who are living off no more than 30% of gross income. (Make %100k in salary, live off only %2,500 per month. Make %45k per year, have to live off %1120 per month.)
So, the high income folks (make a million, live off %250k, or 20,833 per month) would benefit the most. This makes it a regressive tax, by definition.
The Professor

[melm00se]

3. taxes are necessary.

the big issue is how to compute the amount and determining exactly what is "fair".

almost every group believes that they pay too much and everyone else pays too little.

[SteelPenguin]

4. Progressive Federal like we have

Flat taxes and VAT's are good in theory but they quickly become corrupted by reality with restrictions, changes, amendements, and soon it's not a Flat tax anymore, but a flat tax with exceptions for power boats, cars with good gas mileage, food, services in certain low tax development zones, and so on and so forth. It becomes more complicated than it is now, but the progressive aspect is removed for the most part, and replaced by exceptions for those wealthy enough to lobby for them.

Our system isn't perfect but it's better than that. The main complaint I hear from people isn't so much that they hate paying their taxes, but that they hate DOING their taxes. In that case we should work on making that part easier through technology, rather than changing the system entirely.

[baldguy]

5. Another reason for taxes:

As we have seen, there is a great danger in concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.

[KharmaTrain]

6. It's What Holds A Nation Together

Just because a Federal tax is eliminated doesn't mean taxes will...especially on the state level. Without a centralized system we would then have 50 separate taxing districts...all only caring about the immediate needs of their residents and soon you'd see tax breaks or tarrifs imposed on things coming across their borders. In essence, insterstate commerce would become a nightmare. You'd also see a constant flight of jobs and people from one state to another as each attempts to build up their tax bases at the benefit of the others.

[Captain Hilts]

8. Wow! Some want to get rid of progressive income taxes in favor of REgrressive consumption taxes!

Conservatives haven't yet cornered the market on 'stupid'.

[JerseygirlCT]

9. It's not the taxes as much as it is how they're spent

less going to the Pentagon and its contractors and more going to solve real problems instead of creating new ones would be a good start, IMO.

[Lyric]

10. Our tax rates are never going to go down. It's not realistic.

Even if the Federal government somehow managed to get enough support for a flat tax to implement it, the states wouldn't be bound by it. They would adjust their own income tax rates accordingly, and all of the money that's stripped away from the federal government would end up simply being re-routed to state coffers instead. It's the same thing that would happen if we suddenly didn't have to pay import tariffs; corporate America wouldn't lower prices, they'd just re-adjust so that the money that previously went to the government is instead going into their own pockets.

The federal government is big enough to be a powerful bargainer at the table when negotiating for public services. The state governments of Rhode Island or Wyoming, when forced to compete with states like California? Not so much. And of course, the bigger states would benefit *enormously* from this, while the smaller states would suffer. Right now, much of our tax revenue is re-distributed from wealthier states to poorer states, this ensuring at least basic quality-of-life continuity between the states. That would disappear if states like California and New York were able to keep their own money, while states like Alabama and Idaho were forced to make due with the little bit that they can collect. Does it seem fair that big "blue states" end up paying to subsidize smaller "red states"? No. But there are a lot of innocent people who live in those red states--children especially--who don't deserve to suffer for their parents' stupid ideologies.

Progressive taxation by the federal government is the best way to ensure stability between the states. In fact, the tax rate on the wealthiest citizens needs to go back up to what it was before, and the salary cap on Social Security withholdings needs to be eliminated, or at least raised to $300,000 or so.

[davekriss]

11. On your FICA tax comment

I agree with the salary cap. Right now FICA tax is capped at the same level where maximum benefits are calculated. If we're going to raise the cap without raising the benefits, then there is no sense in simply raising it to $300,000, letting the really wealthy off. Might as well remove the cap altogether. Further, might as well tax unearned as well as earned income -- i.e., make it a truly flat tax to pay for social services. Everyone, and all income, taxed equally.

[Lyric]

13. I have no beef about taxing unearned income, but

I'm not sure what you mean by "make it a truly flat tax." Flat taxation is the last thing we want. The wealthy benefit from our government and our society FAR more than the poor do. They should pay taxes in proportion to that benefit.

I'm thinking at least 80-odd percent for the top 1% of earners seems fair.

[davekriss]

14. I refer to FICA tax only with regard to "flat tax"

Today, FICA is regressive. Today, once you're past the cap ($97,500 this year) you pay less and less of your earned income in taxes. If you drop the cap and tax both earned and unearned income at FICA rates, it would essentially be "flat". Achieving that would be progress indeed. I was not suggesting a flat tax on federal income tax; on the contrary, I would like to see more steeply progressive rates.

I recall (showing my age now) that, while mediam wages stayed relatively flat during the Reagan-GHWB years (1980-1992), the increased wealth of the top 1% grew by essentially the same amount as the increase in federal debt. What a racket, huh? It represented a huge transfer of wealth from future generations to a thin sliver of fat cats at the top of the economic pyramid at the time. I can only imagine George Walker Bush has accomplished the same.

I remember seeing a chart in (iirc) one of Michael Harrington's books (Twighlight of Capitalism?) that showed, if you weighed in on all taxes (FIT, FICA, sales tax, state income taxes, etc.), we essentially had an effective flat tax in the seventies. There was a little blip higher at the very bottom and the very top of the income scale, but essentially (again, iirc) everyone was paying around 35% in effective taxes. This was before the Reagan "Revolution", and before GWB's multi-trillion dollar giveaways to his "base". Republicanism is essentially the art of funneling public funds into the hands of a favored few while pulling the wool over the eyes of Joe and Mary six-pack. They're very good at it -- theives, all.

[dysfunctional press]

15. the only way i could consider supporting a 'flat tax' would be if it exempted the first $50K ...

nt

[El Pinko]

16. Why is there an option for the right-wing flat tax...

...but not an option for a return to the more just tax brackets of the 1960s?

I want the exact opposite of a flat tax. Much higher taxes on the wealthiest.