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Strategies & Market Trends : Income Taxes and Record Keeping ( tax ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Colin Cody who wrote (1035)	4/18/1998 6:37:00 AM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5810

Colin, we disagree all right. I am a flat tax proponent, though I admit due to current market distortions owing to government's past and current meddling, there are serious difficulties. I DO NOT support anything like the many characterizations of flat tax folks that have appeared in your many posts on the subject, nor do I agree that one set of citizens should be forced to pay for anothers' bad luck and possibly poor planning (such as your example of the person with cancer, since his tax deduction is my direct expense), or degenerate life styles, or indigence, or laziness, or sleazy "art", or a host of other things. Asking is another story, but not forcing. I will restate that there are significant difficulties (and health care by any measure counts as a "significant difficulty") owing to current market distortions by, you guessed it, the same outfit that brought us the tax code (a singularly well-named piece of work, though perhaps cypher would be a bit better). The current state of health care is one example; all the CPAs, lawyers, and tax preparers the depend on the tax industry for their livelihood is another; all the extra and extraneous government workers those taxes support is another; and etc. ad infinitum and ad nauseam. I am a flat tax proponent who believes we cannot redress past mistakes without recognizing them and actually correcting them. These steps do not involve ignoring the problems that have been generated; but neither do they allow for perpetuating them. If this sounds like I have a flat tax and serious tax and government reduction mixed up, that's half right. The two are part and parcel of the same thing, in my opinion; they go together, but I don't have them mixed up. It would certainly be possible (in theory) to continue to rob the public at a flat rate. It would, however, be much harder, and anyhow I'm not a proponent of it. I'm also not optimistic, but that's another story entirely.