Originally posted by Mr.S.Marbo
Originally posted by Thunderhawker
And all your arguments support my support for the fair tax. A tax on only what you consume would not have any effect on your budget and would, in fact reduce public issues with filing tax returns and such.
I see what you mean and it is a bit better than a flat income tax but don\'t entirely agree on this either. Again those with higher incomes benefit. You simply create your own stuff and buy as little as you can if you have the money and land to do so. You pay people to farm for you, so you avoid buying food or you farm yourself. You barter with other rich people who farm themselves and make things themselves. You set up factories to make things for you and because you are not buying things from yourself you avoid that tax. You buy from abroad or you travel abroad to get things you want. You need a whole new level of bureaucracy to control this, and to try and value barter transactions.
Again the richer people can save on tax by producing things themselves
Sort of - the thing is richer folks consume far more than those with a more limited income, some projections have it a 300% per dollar more (I don\'t really understand that one, but if you do explain it to me)- and you still have the situation where it benefits the richer more than the poorer. Rich and want a house? Don\'t buy it because you\'ll pay sales tax on the whole cost. You might not even need to buy land because you might own a lot already. Build as much of it as you can, pay people to cut the timber for you, lay bricks, make bricks (or do you propose for the workers to charge a \"sales tax\"? Sounds a bit like self employment or employment income tax this)
This also addresses your question further down: All those things you mention: lumber, bricks, plaster etc, would have that tax on them and the price would be reflect in the craftsman\'s fee/rate. Also you would have to have people submitting tax returns for things they sell to collect your tax on sales
True, but that would constitute a business if that was their income. No, you wouldn\'t have to file something for that if you had a yard sale or something. Further, sites like ebay could handle that whole transaction themselves, removing you from the equation by simply adjusting their fees accordingly. Further, service based careers that have no physical product like say lawyers, would charge as they do now and not have to pay tax on it since no consumer good was used (though they still pay the consumer tax oanything they buy)=. You couldn\'t have leeway for small businesses or you\'d lose too much wouldn\'t you ?
What good is leeway if the percentage is the same for everyone? A million dollar consumer producer pays the same percentage as the fifty thousand dollar one Hence more people caught whenever they sell something and most people still having to do tax returns to declare the sales tax they owe.
What about services? would they be exempt from the sales tax? What about economies that are largely service based? The one man self employed cleaner? If you apply a sales tax to his fees is the flat tax the same value to him as it is to the multimillion pound corporation? You can see you are slipping back into the old problem. That is paying the sales tax is still more of a burden on those who earn less because the flat rate is worth more to them. Or do you propose services are exempt?
