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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sunny Jim who wrote (46474)	2/16/2009 4:59:51 PM
From: KyrosL	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218377

The biggest tax potential in the US is sales or value added taxes. Exclude food, medicine, and housing and tax the rest. Europe has a 18% VAT. We have an average of 5% or so state sales tax. If we go halfway to European levels we can easily cover the deficit. Sales taxes that exclude food/medicine/housing fall mostly on imports, so it's a good way to also discourage people from buying imported stuff, thus reducing the trade deficit. Another huge potential is gasoline taxes. We pay peanuts compared to all other industrialized countries. We burn 10 million barrels of gasoline a day, or 420 million gallons. Like the sales taxes on non-necessities, heavy gasoline taxes have the additional advantage of discouraging use of imported oil, thus reducing the trade deficit.