The flat tax idea is one big scam from a to z. If you aren’t wealthy, don’t buy it.
Everything is getting too complex. Modern life is too complex. Computers, TVs, gadgets everywhere. Our tax system is too complex. When the tax code was first created it was eleven pages long. Now it is more like 11,000 pages, a maze of write-offs, loop holes and evasions.
The Republican political scam artists are counting on your weariness of complexity to sell you on the idea of a flat tax. Ten percent for everyone. Or twenty percent. Whatever. That’s fair, right? No exemptions. Simple. You can put the whole tax schedule on a postcard.
The political scam artists are counting on your weariness of complexity … AND … your inability to see through their scam. Your first clue that the flat tax idea smells should be that it is being pushed by the wealthy. Why do the wealthy like a flat tax?
A flat tax scale is wealth redistribution neutral. With a flat tax, what the wealthy take from everyone else in the private sector the government can NEVER redistribute back to the middle class and the poor using the tax system. Except for the luxuries purchased by the obscenely wealthy and investments to suck in even more wealth, nothing’s neva gonna trickle down to the commoners. All the fruit of the labor of everyone else that gets sucked upward into wealthland stays in wealthland … forever.
Only a progressive tax scale in which the wealthier are taxed at a higher tax RATE then the middle class and the poor has the ability to redistribute back to the middle class and poor some of the huge sums of money the greedy wealthy suck out of the rest of the populace in the private sector.
Oh, but a progressive tax would be more complex than a flat tax, right? Wrong! A tax table for a flat tax with no exemptions and a tax table for a progressive tax with no exemptions could be both be printed in the same space … on a postcard, if you wish. Ask any honest accountant.
So don’t be impressed when they wave the postcard at you.
It’s the write-offs, loop holes and evasions that bloat the tax code, not that it may be progressive. Get rid of the loopholes, all the loopholes, and you get the postcard.
Just remember: If you’re not in the upper crust and you want a simpler tax code, you should want a progressive tax code with NO exemptions.
(Yeah, you would lose your exemptions too. But the wealthy have a lot more and a lot better exemptions then you do. Believe me; get rid of the exemptions and YOU, not the wealthy, will be better off by a country mile.)
Always beware of Republicans bearing gifts.
There are only two kinds of Republicans: rich people and fools.
P.S. All consumption taxes, like the sales taxes you pay when you buy stuff, are REGRESSIVE. Expressed as a percentage of one’s annual income or accumulated wealth, consumption taxes always tax the poor folks at a much higher tax rate than the rich folks. The shifting of taxation from federal income tax to local sales tax during recent decades is the biggest tax scam of all! Ya gotta buy bread, right? So now poor folks get stuck paying most of the taxes because, after all, they gotta buy bread. So don’t fall for the consumption tax scam either. And Herman Cain’s 999 tax plan really is 666, as has been pointed out. For the middle class and the poor it really does come straight from the devil.