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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (9322)	1/20/2006 1:47:44 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541299

I'm not sure that it would produce significantly less revenue than the current system. But it might. If her opinion's about the benefits of the changes is correct it could reduce more revenue, but of course her opinions about these benefits are not solidly demonstrated facts (or even well researched and supported speculation), and even if they are correct the lag would probably be years. In any case I don't see why the measure of a new tax code should be if it produces a balanced budget. We currently don't have a balanced budget so even if the fiscal balance is your most important criteria the budget could be far from balanced but still be better than our current situation. I do like the idea that even though the poor pay no net tax under this system (in fact they get a negative "tax" in place of EITC and maybe in place of some other forms of public assistance), increases in taxing and spending do result in a small hit to the poor as well. However I think the idea is likely built on a foundation of sand, ready to collapse at the first serious challenge. Future congresses would be unlikely to keep any fixed relationship between the rates for various incomes, so there would be no near automatic hit to everyone for every spending increase. If this idea could actually hold it would be one of the best aspects of this tax idea but I don't think it would hold. Did you see anything interesting, or anything that you would agree with or disagree with in the comments to that blog post? One that I definitely disagree with is the response suggesting a 5% tax on your net worth. No wait its even worse it suggests a 5% tax on your gross worth. (So I would pay tax on the value of my home and car without any consideration of the fact that I have around $180k of debt. I wonder how they would count my money in my 401K). Tim