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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (543458)	2/20/2004 9:44:54 PM
From: Srexley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

"I'm talking about income taxes here" Before you were talking about wealth (which is not income), and FICA. Neither of these are straight income taxes. "If the tax were flat they'd be paying 43% of the taxes" 1st of all, flat means the same percentage for everybody. A 10% flat tax for instance. But I see you are not talking about that here, so I'll go with your "flat" tax. Seems like there would be a collection problem. Because until everyone sent in their taxes, you would not know the individuals actual percentage of total income from working Americans. Are you proposing that they just send in their income statements, and then a bill would come some time later? "Do you think that would be too much?" Yes. I have already explained that 3,600% of their share of the government's bill (as an individual American) is plenty. Thought I was pretty clear on that. "Do you think a flat income tax would be unfair to the wealthy?" Me and you look at what a flat tax is differently. Abolish SS (since it all goes to general fund as you say), and charge ALL Americans the same rate. That would be fair because you would be taxing the same percentage of the efforts they put out. But you have a different definition of flat tax, I think. "Do you know what regressive means?" I think it means the opposite of progressive. In America the more you make, the higher percentage you pay. You're playing with numbers (as dems do) to make your case that it is regressive. The TOP PROGRESSIVE tax rate is 35%. It includes more than the top 1% of wage earners though. But the gov't is getting 35% (the highest rate) of every dollar above the starting point of that tax bracket. To brake it down by percentages, we would have 100 tax brackets. To do what you seem to be proposing (each person pay his/her percentage of total income), you would have somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000,000 brackets. Seems a bit unwieldly to me. But I am just a dumb ass that feels sorry for rich people who is bad at math, right? lol