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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (130255)	1/2/2001 9:14:42 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575941

"Randomly sending out checks has none of those benefits." But it does have the advantage of being cheap to administer, short term and a quick shot in the old economic arm. Probably less corruption too, being as how it would only happen once in a great while. As far as the rest of the things you posted, it is hard to prove whether they really do what is stated. There are always tax avoidance schemes, just like there are those convinced that certain taxes are illegal. The tax code has a high degree of hysteresis. Any changes made tend to be temporary, over time the tax code tends to drift right back to where it was before. A big reason is that taxes are used to reward friends (look at the special bills passed by Congress that exempt certain individuals from inheritance taxes, for example) and punish those who do things that are not approved of. I dare say that every tax reform in this century, and probably longer, eventually drifted back to whatever the historical norm was, either sooner or later. Note: this is not a Rupublican/Democratic thing, they have slightly different things that they want taxed or untaxed, but the net result is more or less the same. The dynamics are such that the things that are desired to be taxed usually are, the things untaxed generally not. In the present regime, I would prefer to see lower interest rates than a tax cut. Taxes ar fairly low with respect to recent history and especially when you consider the other developed (and many lesser developed) countries in the world.