Thompson on taxes


Thompson leads the GOP candidates, but he doesn't go far enough
Fred Thompson has a tax plan.

Mr. Thompson wants to abolish the death tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax and cut the corporate income tax rate to 27% from 35%. But his really big idea is a voluntary flat tax that would give every American the option of ditching the current code in favor of filing a simple tax return with two tax rates of 10% and 25%.

Mr. Thompson is getting aboard what has become a global bandwagon, with more than 20 nations having adopted some form of flat tax. Most--especially in Eastern Europe--have seen their economies grow and revenues increase as they've adopted low tax rates of between 13% and 25% with few exemptions.

The main political obstacle to such a reform in the U.S. has come from liberals, who favor punitive taxes for "class" reasons, and K Street corporate lobbyists who want to retain their tax-loophole empires. The housing and insurance industries, states and localities, charities, bond traders and tax preparers are all foes of low tax rates.

Senator Thompson's plan isn't good enough. I would go one step further.

Rescind the 16th Amendment. Add another amendment that in the first part specifically prohibits any income tax at any level of government within the United States. No more income tax means no more withholding, which means IMMEDIATE cash in the pocket. No more IRS means means that the cost of doing business for banks would decline, so much so that I estimate there would be a 30-50% decline in interest rates within one month. Most importantly, no more IRS means no more presumption of guilt.

Create a national sales tax to be applied uniformly to all goods and services with no exemptions and no exceptions. The biggest single advantage of sales taxes is that they are mostly self-administrating, needing only a fraction of the resources of an income tax.

And the second part of our new amendment would specifically limit the TOTAL (Federal, State, and local) sales tax collected to 10% unless approved annually BY THE VOTERS.

Now the common wisdom is that a sales tax is the most regressive tax possible. I absolutely agree, but there are three things that should be considered here.

First, , most of the poor don't stay poor in the U.S.

Second, we don't want people to stay poor.

And third, the best way I know of to keep taxes low is to make sure that people get seriously angry when the tax rate rises. If someone has to vote for higher taxes on themselves, there had better be an overriding reason or they are going to get incredibly pissed off.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - November 28, 2007 at 05:49 AM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved