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RE: Rich people should pay more taxes. Do you agree or disagree?
I do not think the rich should pay more taxes as I believe the income tax should be what it was before 1913 - Zero.
I do like the idea of this luxury tax the essay touches on, I have heard this idea before. Similar to a consumption tax, individuals would pay taxes for what they consume, not purchase or earn.
I totally agree, I'm against progressive income taxation and personally think that a "luxury" good tax would be a more viable fiscal revenue generating method. My title should be seen as a prompt, I explore and criticise.
Zero taxes? How do propose we pay for schools, roads, police departments, etc.?
In the same way we pay for bread, cars, mobile phones, etc.
Voluntarily, and the prices are found via supply and demand 👍
That sounds great in theory, but who do you think is going to volunteer to pay for roads, schools, etc.? Those are all basic services that as a society, we expect (and in my opinion, we should expect them). There is no going backwards. Just to play that scenario out, lets say government no longer pays for roads. Interstate commerce goes into decline because I'm not going to volunteer to pay for roads in other areas. Well, then food and products can't get shipped. You would essentially kill businesses and business innovation (and thus most jobs in our modern world), and send us back to a time of mass poverty and disease. Most people are not going to volunteer to go back to rural agrarian communities just so they don't have to pay taxes. On the other hand, most people would lose their jobs, so then they wouldn't have to worry about paying taxes. So no taxes, yay!
As the author of this blog wrote, the biggest concern is not paying taxes, but what happens to that money. I think we all want responsible use of our taxes.
Everybody world pay according to his utilization of the roads. There is a demand for streets. A grocery store must ship goods from a wholesale company to its shop. So the owner of the grocery store needs a road for this. A road building company would build a road and afterwards the company gets a fee from each car and truck using this road. The fee can discriminate for weight (the more weight, the more damage to the road) or length of the car/ truck or number of passengers. With today‘s technology (GPS, DSRC) this can be done very efficiently and smoothly (e.g. German truck toll System).
Why should we need (corrupt) government officials to manage that? They just increase the price, lower the accountability of the road building company, distort the market. This socialist policy leads to a situation where modern highways are built in regions where they are not needed and a shortage of broad, modern highways in regions where they are needed —> socialist resource allocation problem. A central organ (government) simply cannot process all the information of millions of people and entities. Therefore we need the market mechanism.
Roy2016 brings up a good point - sales taxes are another way. I would be OK with increasing the sales tax to pay for basic infrastructure.
Remember, we have only had the income tax for 105 years, somehow our country did fine for 150 years prior to then.
We need to take a hard look at the Federal Reserve Act (repeal it) along with the the Income Tax Act - which was passed the same year (not by coincidence).
Taxes are necessary, just not should not be involuntarily and automatic.
Tariffs and taxes voted on by the people throughout the year for specific projects. That way the people have some say in where their hard-earned money goes.
I am only suggesting the income tax should be zero, that we should not have money automatically deducted from our paychecks without a choice in the matter.
To pay for the things you mention, the first thing would be to cut all the military spending. We also have the issue of paying the interest on our extraordinary national debt.
In theory I agree, but that's assuming an electorate that is educated on all issues and that will never happen. I am in no way qualified to have a say or opinion on tariffs of tea leaves from China, nor do I want to be. At some point we have to rely on people knowledgeable in fields other than our own.
As for cutting military spending - would the world be a better place if everyone did that? Absolutely. But it wouldn't work unless everyone did that, and that will never happen (unfortunately).
And don't even get me started on the debt.....sigh
Schools are paid for by property taxes, roads by gas tax, police are by local taxes. The federal income tax is unconstitutional and only punishes success and rewards failure.