Taxes

[bigrigjoe66]

I was just wondering if a flat tax would be better than what we have now. I am in favor of a flat tax. Now all the politicians and fat cats hire people to get them out of taxes and some people don't file at all. Illegals and all those Indians who own all the stores and motels don't even pay. A flat tax on what you buy, nobody gets a round. I guess 22% is fair.

[Malaki86]

I agree 100% on the flat tax.

[Jumbo]

Now, Are you refering to a flat across the board income tax where everybody pays the same rate? Or, the Steve Forbes eliminate the income tax and go with a national sales tax on everything?

[GMAN]

It depends on what taxes are eliminated as to whether I would want a flat tax. It would be more equitable. We would no longer need to file a tax return. That would save this country billions of dollars. We could eliminate the IRS, which would save billions in wages and benefits. A flat tax, as proposed on purchases, would essentially be a national sales tax. The mechanism is already in place for collection. One thing that I do like about it is that it would potentially give more control back to the states. The states could collect the money from businesses and then send a check to the feds. I doubt that we would get rid of the IRS with this type of tax but it could happen. I think 5% would be a better rate for a national sales tax. 22% is way too high if more people are paying. Nothing would help unless the people force the government to become smaller. The flat tax could help.

[bigrigjoe66]

Ok whatever the rate I mean no irs no taxes other than the national sales tax.

[GMAN]

We will never be able to collect enough taxes to support our government until we begin to force them to reduce spending and get rid of so much or the bureaucracy. It isn't nearly so difficult to support a constitutional government. One reason so many have not taken a stand against these new taxes is that so many of these people are getting a handout from the government in one way or another. We need taxes to support our government. My problem is with the amount of taxes and the unfairness of the current way in which the government exercises those levies.

[Jay B]

Sounds like you are refering to the fair tax. Find one of the books on the subject by Neal Boortz. He explains it very well and makes some good points on how and why it can work.

[VitoCorleone99]

The Fair Tax is an interesting concept. If there are as many illegals and other undocumented workers as we're led to believe, then they would have to pay the same taxes on their expenditures as I pay on mine. Plus you would stop punishing productivity and you would encourage savings and investment. (Contrast this with the borrowing and spending that we're encouraging right now. "We need to get credit flowing." Rinse, recycle, repeat... thank God for the ChiComs.)

I would only have a couple of concerns with the Fair Tax. I wonder about the effect that it may have on people who live on a fixed income and currently don't pay much (if any) income tax. I don't think anybody should go without paying taxes, but I can't fault the people who benefit under the current system if they would get hammered in a transition to a new system. I've heard ideas about refunds for the first however much in annual expenses and such, but this just sounds like another bureaucracy to me. Second is the fact that, unless the 16th Amendment were repealed in the process, we would be left open to repeating today's runaway taxing and spending at some point in the future.

As long as some people have more money than other people, there will be a sizable number who clamor for their "fair share," no matter how you arrange the taxation. There are people to this day who think that lower-income Americans somehow got screwed by the tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, even though the facts show exactly the opposite. Now we have a system where roughly 40% of people pay no income tax at all, the poorest actually collect credits from taxes that someone else paid, and the wealthiest pay a larger portion of the federal take than they did before. Do you think people know this? Of course not. They think that $8 a week in their paychecks (until it expires next year) is better than what they got under the former president. Do you think people knew that "tax cuts for 95% of working families" really meant temporary $400 rebates? Do you think people realize that the $600 checks we got last year were bigger? Of course not. (Given the First Lady's spin on those $600 rebates, I must admit that the widespread celebration of this year's $400 is rather amusing to me.)

Even if you did repeal the 16th Amendment, the politicians would find a way to start playing their social engineering games. It would just take them a little more work to keep it constitutional. If there is a way to restrain any growth in taxation constitutionally, then I think the Fair Tax could put us far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of economic growth. That's an awfully big 'if' though.

[LightsChromeHorsepower]

The Bush tax cuts went disproportionately to the wealthy. That is part of why we are where we are now- They invested those tax savings in hedge funds that made wildly speculative investments.

Something that I find interesting is that although the US has one of the highest nominal tax rates of any industrialized nation, it has one of the lowest effective overall tax rates.

What's the difference?

Our tax codes are littered with special exceptions or loopholes that allow all sorts of what amounts to legal tax evasion. Who benefits the most from all this?

If you guessed corporations and the wealthy- bingo!

I'm not sure what the answer is, but there are a few things I am sure of-

1. What we have now isn't working.

2. If you want services, you have to pay taxes.

3. The services need to be delivered a lot more efficiently.

4. You have to get the taxes from people who have the money to pay them- as in the wealthy & corporations.

This is a good discussion.

[GMAN]

You cannot get all the taxes from the wealthy and corporations. Most corporations are smaller businesses. The tax burden has always fallen on the middle class. That is the largest group in this country. The wealthy cannot afford to pay enough taxes to keep this country going. The poor don't earn enough to pay much, if any, taxes. That leaves the middle class. I think either a flat rate on everyone, regardless of income, would be the most equitable if we are to continue on this road to tax income. The country was funded at one time with excise tax and property taxes. Excise tax is a tax on imported goods. The current tax systems is not fair. It unfairly taxes or punishes those who earn the most money. Some would argue that the rich can more easily afford to pay higher taxes. A flat rate would tax everyone the same, regardless of income. We pay so many other taxes I am not sure that we really need an income tax. We need smaller government. The fair tax promoted by Neil Boortz is a value added tax collected like sales tax. In fact, we could call it a national sales tax. One problem I see with a national sales tax has to do with them congress being able to change the rate on a whim. I think it would be easier for congress to raise taxes under this type of system.

I think most people would agree that we need to pay taxes to support our government. We disagree on the amount of taxes and how it is collected. Right now, the burden falls squarely on the employer. I don't think that is fair to the employer. One reason this was set up this way is to force compliance. It would be much more difficult to collect taxes from people who had to sit down and write the government a check each payday. It would force taxpayers to see how much tax they actually pay. I think there would be a rebellion if everyone had to sit down and write a check. A flat tax with the same rate for everyone makes much more sense, whether that is from a value added tax or income tax.

[Phantom433a]

First we need to kick all those people off of welfare.....and I'm NOT talking about single mothers and some such.

These are the ones I'm talking about

Congress: Rank-and-File Members' Salary
The current salary (2009) for rank-and-file members of the House and Senate is $174,000 per year.
Congress: Leadership Members' Salary (2009)
Leaders of the House and Senate are paid a higher salary than rank-and-file members.
Senate Leadership
Majority Leader - $193,400 Minority Leader - $193,400
House Leadership
Speaker of the House - $223,500
Majority Leader - $193,400
Minority Leader - $193,400

Members of Congress are not eligible for a pension until they reach the age of 50, but only if they've completed 20 years of service. Members are eligible at any age after completing 25 years of service or after they reach the age of 62. Please also note that Member's of Congress have to serve at least 5 years to even receive a pension.
The amount of a Congressperson's pension depends on the years of service and the average of the highest 3 years of his or her salary. By law, the starting amount of a Member's retirement annuity may not exceed 80% of his or her final salary.
According to the Congressional Research Service, 413 retired Members of Congress were receiving federal pensions based fully or in part on their congressional service as of Oct. 1, 2006. Of this number, 290 had retired under CSRS and were receiving an average annual pension of $60,972. A total of 123 Members had retired with service under both CSRS and FERS or with service under FERS only. Their average annual pension was $35,952 in 2006.

[VitoCorleone99]

The idea that you can get a dime in tax from a corporation is the single biggest canard (second to the "Bush tax cuts for the rich" canard) in the whole taxation discussion. Corporate taxes are 100% passed on to the consumer by the bigger businesses. The smaller corporations tend to pay the taxes as individuals. Corporations do not pay taxes. Sure, there is a line on their financial statement for taxes paid. Those taxes are simply built into the price of the company's goods and services. There is no "Mr. Exxon" sitting at the "Exxon Estate" and writing checks on his grandfather's mahogany desk. If you raise corporate taxes, you affect the middle class far more than any other group. Moving to a consumption tax would get rid of the hidden costs to the consumer. We would be the ones paying the sales tax that replaced the hidden corporate tax, but at least we would know that amount at the time of the transaction.

Any discussion of how you'll sock it to this group or that group is a fundamental oversight of the real problem. The money itself is the real problem. The politicians need way too much money to keep doing all of these things that the Constitution would never have allowed them to do. Would we have to worry about corrupt politicians funneling money from the bank bailouts to their corrupt spouses if there was no bailout money to funnel in the first place? Think about it.

To help cut down on the growth in spending, the flat taxes would keep people from voting themselves more benefits on someone else's back. There's a tendency now for politicians to promise people the moon and stars and then - the best part - someone else can pay for it. We'll raise his taxes and not yours! Awesome! I would also include a proviso that everyone, no matter his income, would pay a minimum of $250 in federal income tax each year. As someone mentioned earlier, if you want the services you need to pay for them. Those who want the most services, in point of fact, currently don't pay a penny for them.

Most of us would be perfectly content to pay a reasonable tax rate to support police and highways and the military and such. I personally draw the line at things like dog parks in other states, condoms for drug addicts, and subsidies for businesses who can't compete on their own. I'm not real keen on 12.4% of my earned income going into a payroll tax black hole that may give me a couple thousand bucks a month when I'm 80 years old either. The feds put Bernie Madoff to shame when it comes to investment scams. If SSI is a pension, then get it out of the general budget. If it's not a pension and we're going to start taxing rich people more to cover the shortfalls, then call it what it is - forced welfare.

I also agree that we should have to write a check for our taxes every week, or perhaps every month as a more practical matter. House payment, car payment, electric bill, phone bill, tax bill... The fact that they sneak it out little by little and we never face the pain of "paying" the tax man is one more thing that has allowed them to grow the government completely out of control. What if your car company came to you and said, "Hey we would really like to start putting Evian dispensers in our cars, so we're going to need to hike your car payment a little. It's just a little though, and we're raising some rich guy's car payment even more." You might pretty pissed when you wrote the next month's check, I suspect.

[Jumbo]

I think the three biggest challenges would be:

1) Getting rid of the IRS. I dont think anybody is going propose that these 96,000 government employees be given a pink slip. Like Gman said we already have the means to collect a national sales tax in place, so what purpose would these people serve? Maybe have them collect back taxes from the people who still owe them.

2) Getting the government to stop wasting our money. If having a national sales tax raises more money by making sure everybody pays taxes the government has to stop spending it like there is no tomorrow.

3) Illegals. The argument has been made that illegals dont pay taxes but get the services. If they start paying in the form of a national sales tax now are they not taxpayers? And wouldnt that be taxation without representation? That sure opens a new can of worms.

[LightsChromeHorsepower]

You cannot get all the taxes from the wealthy and corporations................. The tax burden has always fallen on the middle class...................... The wealthy cannot afford to pay enough taxes to keep this country going............................................. ............... .

Bullchit on top of more bullchit.

A flat tax is in fact a regressive tax. A progressive tax system is the foundation of any morally just society.

See what Warren Buffet has to say on the subject; YouTube - Warren Buffett's Tax Rate is Lower than His Secretary's

When you have the wealthiest people in the nation being taxed at a lower rate than their secretaries, the system is broken. When you have those being taxed at a higher rate defending the system, the entire society is broken.

[Rev.Vassago]

See what Warren Buffet has to say on the subject; YouTube - Warren Buffett's Tax Rate is Lower than His Secretary's

When you have the wealthiest people in the nation being taxed at a lower rate than their secretaries, the system is broken. When you have those being taxed at a higher rate defending the system, the entire society is broken.

Warren Buffett is a poor example. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, pays him a salary of $1.00 per year (far less than what his secretary earns). The rest of his income comes from capital gains, which are taxed differently than income from wages. Comparing his tax rate to his secretary's is comparing apples to oranges.

What you are neglecting to mention is that Warren Buffett earns his income as capital gains so that he can pay less taxes on it. His crying out that it is unfair that he get taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is hypocritical.

[VitoCorleone99]

Warren Buffett is a poor example. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, pays him a salary of $1.00 per year (far less than what his secretary earns). The rest of his income comes from capital gains, which are taxed differently than income from wages. Comparing his tax rate to his secretary's is comparing apples to oranges.

What you are neglecting to mention is that Warren Buffett earns his income as capital gains so that he can pay less taxes on it. His crying out that it is unfair that he get taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is hypocritical.

He's also combining payroll taxes and income taxes in order to reach his conclusion. None of his employees are paying 30% in income taxes. He has to add in the part of the tax code that only applies to the first ~$100K in earnings so he can artificially lower the rates of wealthy executives when compared to their employees. This is 100% phony. Payroll taxes are different from income tax. Mr. Buffett is a progressive (as the modern liberal prefers to be called). The idea that he would use twisted math in order to support higher taxes on the wealthy should hardly come as a surprise to anyone.

[LightsChromeHorsepower]

Don't you understand that the rich deliberately structure their business affairs so as to get most of their income via capital gains, stock options, carry interest income etc. precisely so they can avoid paying taxes.

This is not fair.

Are you so brainwashed by the right wing media that you think this is how it should be?

Why should the source of the income make any difference as to the rate at which it is taxed?

And if it is going to make a difference, shouldn't income derived from labor, where people actually work and produce tangible things for others to use, be taxed at a LOWER rate than income derived from financial speculation or what in the recent past would have been considered usury?

Do you believe in the working man or do you believe in greedy speculators? Do you want manufacturing industries in this country or do you want financial firms and service jobs? The structure of our tax code has a huge impact on these questions. What we have now is the near total ascendancy of capital over labor. At the rate we are going, pretty soon everybody who doesn't have a maid and a gardener will be one.

[VitoCorleone99]

Don't you understand that the rich deliberately structure their business affairs so as to get most of their income via capital gains, stock options, carry interest income etc. precisely so they can avoid paying taxes.

And? I'm pretty sure that they would be dumb not to do so. If there were a flat tax, as the thread was discussing, there would be no point, would there?

This is not fair.

Are you so brainwashed by the right wing media that you think this is how it should be?

And here's why it's pointless to debate ideologies on the internet. A discussion of actual tax laws and practices will inevitably become a discussion of someone's feelings about what is right and what is moral and how much The Man is keeping people down. (And it doesn't tend to be the side with facts to present that resorts to this sort of rhetoric, just for the record.)

I wasn't aware that there were any right wing media, but I guess there must be and I must be too brainwashed to see past the fact that your feelings and morality simply don't jive with the empirical data from our nation's 230 years of history.

The point when facts and discussion get subjugated for this nonsense is the point where I exit the conversation. Good luck with putting The Man in his place though. Maybe we'll have 70% of the country paying no income taxes sooner or later. That ought to make you feel morally justified... or something.

[GMAN]

I just heard on the news that Obama wants to raise our taxes to 50%. Big surprise, eh? I wonder how much longer the people will give him a free pass on what he wants to do? Although he stated that he will not raise taxes there is no way to avoid it. You cannot push the government to spend trillions of dollars and not raise taxes. These programs will need to be paid for by someone. The more taxes we pay the less we have to spend on things we need. That takes more money out of the economy. The more the government does the higher taxes need to go to pay for it. For those who don't understand how government spending works I will explain briefly. The government doesn't produce any products or services that they can sell to generate revenue. The only way ANY government can raise revenue or money is through taxation. The more government spends the more tax money they require to pay for it. Those who receive money from the government give little thought to where the government gets that money. It comes through taxing those of us who work and pay taxes. It doesn't directly affect those who pay no taxes or don't work. I am for any means that would more equitably tax everyone. That may include a flat tax for everyone. I can see individuals and companies saving billions of dollars in compliance and accounting costs. The government would save many billions of dollars in not having to print tax forms and cutting jobs. Unfortunately, the displaced IRS employees would likely be moved to another job rather than losing their jobs. I don't recall when the government has laid off anyone. Perhaps we need to have a balanced budget amendment. If the money isn't there then the government cannot spend the money. I would like to see the government be forced to not borrow money at all. It would be better if the government was forced to save for any programs that they want to initiate. It would make them more accountable.

[golfhobo]

I just heard on the news that Obama wants to raise our taxes to 50%.

And this is how rumors get started. But, at least you didn't cut and paste some right wing "scare" email about it.

I heard that discussion the other day on FoxNews on that program where Wayne Rogers (from MASH) and a few others discuss financial subjects. Someone got all excited and tallied up all the various taxes and came up to that figure. It was rushed in, brushed over, and moved on without fully explaining how they came up with it... but, I was listening.

They were originally just talking about the 3 or 6% increase in taxes (for the richest 2%) as a result of letting Bush tax cuts expire. So, the base level is 39% (I think it WILL be.)

Then someone mentioned state income taxes, and local Sales Taxes. Assuming average levels of both, it comes up to about 50%. Of course, they didn't bother getting their facts straight, in that sales taxes have nothing to do with incomes.

Nor did they point out that, without letting the Bush tax cuts expire, the "total" would only be that 3 or 6 % difference... still in the mid 40% range.

Sorry, but I can't remember the exact percentage that Bush LOWERED the rich's taxes by... since it will never apply to me.

So, as most crap on FoxNews evolves... it doesn't surprise me that they are still throwing around that "scary" figure without explaining how they came up with it.

IF you make more than the threshhold level set for the ROLLBACK of the Bush tax cuts, your taxes will go up by that small percentage.... back to where they were before Bush put you on welfare. If you don't.... your taxes are not going to change. At least for now.