1.) I called it a regressive tax the last time Wookie06 posted about it. He thinks regression is a good thing.

2.) People are seriously arguing for it so it's obviously not as "duh" as you think.

Look, I'm just saying it's probably a bad sign if the best case scenario for your new tax scheme is that it causes inflation fast enough to prevent aggregate demand from collapsing. Especially if one of the goals of your scheme is to increase savings. Yikes.

There are ways to make a consumption tax less regressive (though no completely). Namely, not taxing food, housing, or healthcare. Unfortunately, this makes up about 65% of of the expenses of "poor" people. However, it does fit into the demsoc ideal of "charging the rich more" than the poor, i.e. we would be taxing the "luxuries" you mentioned. It won't be enough, however, which is why we need a hybrid income/consumption tax. An income tax on businesses over a certain size, or a payroll tax on wages over a certain threshold, or a very small marginal tax rate would help make up the difference.

[And that substantial law enforcement you mentioned? It's gotta be less costly (both monetarily and in terms of time) than what the IRS has to do every year under our current system.]

SocDem. Not DemSoc.

The last time the US tried a luxury consumption tax (under Clinton), all it did was make those industries keel over. It did **** all else. (When I wrote it there was no pun intended, but actually it had an extreme impact on the US yacht industry, so, keel.) Unless your goal is to stop rich people from buying pretty things, I guess it's okay? Otherwise it's really not even worth doing.

If you want a ~fair tax~, why not start with the fact that we have to pay taxes on our property but rich people don't? Working homeowners have the vast majority of their wealth tied up in their own home, and they have to pay property taxes on that. Why don't rich people have to pay property taxes on the majority of their property? That doesn't seem very ~fair tax~ to me.

Nah, under the current system companies self-report the incomes of their employees. You're talking about trillions of dollars in latex gloves alone just lookin for gems.

Since the topic has come up here before I'm pretty sure you don't actually have to guess what the Fair Tax proposal is but, yes, I know it doesn't jive with your ideology (that you'll claim isn't ideology).

Everything I wrote above could appear in any neoclassical economics textbook. Consumption taxes are stupid. At worst they should be a small part of a complicated tax system, at best they shouldn’t exist.

I guess if I thought you understood your own suggestion, I could respect the fact that you, as a working age poor person, endorse your own public financial butt****ing because you at least thought it was the right thing for your country. But since I’m pretty sure you’re just taking a rich person’s word on how great a 100% tax cut on rich people would be, I don’t. You might disagree with my ideology but at least I’m informed enough about the way the world works to have one.

Sounds good!

Holy ****ing Christ, is this what you’re talking about?

Fair Tax Act (H.R. 25/S. 18).

23% on retail sales of new goods for personal consumption. Includes consumer goods. Includes rent.

Explicitly excludes all B2B transactions, personal stock/securities purchases, and other investments (which by my reading of sec 102 a 2 would also include practically all high end luxury goods, most notably artwork and jewelry).

This is way more regressive than i even thought.

Is this a joke? Are you trolling with this?

You can’t actually consider this good.

Like an actual clean across-the-board VAT, I can kinda almost see how someone of a sufficient ideological skew might think it’s an ok alternative to income taxation, but this Fair Tax thing is ****ing AGGRESSIVELY written to keep rich people from having to pay ANYTHING.

Im actually having a hard time thinking of how you could invent a worse tax scheme without violating the 13th amendment.

Please tell me you’re ****ing with me

Like, under this bill poor people would pay 23% sales tax on everything they buy including rent. Clothes, yes. Plumber, yes. Buy a car? 23%. Need to get it fixed? 23%.

But a rich person can buy a mansion, tax free, and fill it with artwork and antique furniture, tax free. They can fill the 8 car garage with lamborghinis and rolls royces all tax free (since they’re resellable). Then for everything else, they can buy a company, tax free, that holds their yacht and jet - both purchased and maintained, tax free. No offshore holding company needed, it’s right in the house resolution. US domiciled A-OK. Oh, I can think of a few ways to structure an estate so that business also effectively buys services to maintain your personal property and possibly even feeds your family, all tax free.

The way this HR was written makes it absolutely superficial for rich people to evade this tax, and that’s just the part that doesn’t explicitly exempt them from paying it. Poor people, though, are given no quarter here.

Simply awful. This has to be a joke.

I thought it was just some dip**** right wing social media talking point, I didn’t realize one of you idiots actually put it to paper. I definitely didn’t realize it was as bad as this.

Holy **** was I right though, you really were just taking a rich guy’s word on this Wookie06. Even I don’t think you’d be stupid enough to support this bill if you knew what it meant.

Like seriously, when I called it a 100% tax cut on rich people before I was just being hyperbolic. But it actually IS a 100% tax cut on rich people.

As a result of the House's investigations into Trump, he is now saying he is the victim of "presidential harassment".

5% yearly tax on excess wealth. Doitnowplease.

Lol, I just looked it up online:



Do these supporters realize that these two things are mutually exclusive? The economy grows from people spending their money on ****. It doesn't grow from people saving their money to be reinvested by the bank.

This is like the clearest cut proof that this **** is a joke and has no serious economic thought put into it.

Judging by Wookie06’s casual disdain for thought, the supporters probably conclude that any opposition to their scheme is ideological bias.

hey do you guys remember a few hours ago when wookie06 implied that whatever I want must require us to tear the world down and rebuild it, and then in the same breath advocated for a sensible income tax replacement that apparently even its informed supporters insist absolutely requires a guaranteed minimum income to work?

Not to alleviate its regressiveness; they don’t know what that means and wouldn’t care if they did. But to prevent the entire US economy from instantly halting and catching fire as the already-untaxed working poor majority, who are one unplanned $200 expense away from homelessness, is suddenly expected to cough up enough to cover goods prices at their new equilibrium.

Which, FYI, we live under a market economy, so a 60% tax doesn’t necessarily mean the price hike would be 60%. Sometimes it will be lower. Sometimes it will be higher than 60%, and in extreme cases some stuff wouldn’t be profitable to make at all at the new price so the hike effectively becomes infinite. (This is some Econ 101 ****: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss#Deadweight_loss_of_taxation adding in the fact that supply and demand curves aren’t straight lines IRL.)

Meanwhile I’m not sure where the money to cover this guaranteed minimum income is supposed to come from, because the tax is designed so that people avoid paying it (or, as they put it, incentivize savings). So rich people restructure their expenses to avoid paying the tax, as discussed above, while middle class people skip the new TV because it costs too much and... what, speculate on the stock market, I guess? (Oh boy, I think we’ve just spotted another way this helps the billionaires.)

Well **** I was just gonna suggest a 1% asset tax but I guess that’s just too ****in radical

income taxes are too just too complicated! oh hey I know, let’s implement a nightmare version of social democracy on top of an economy that actively punishes growth

on wait, I mean, the economy won’t shrink because people will invest all of those savings into factories and ****. You know. To make stuff people can’t afford to buy.

This fair tax thing is just so ****ing stupid, I could go on like this for another ten pages counting off the ways that it’s stupid and all of the reasons we already know it’s bad from history, without even repeating myself. Somehow the nutbars have come up with a revenue scheme worse than stamp taxes and currency debasement

Hey, like for example there’s the fact that everybody would have so much incentive to just ignore the tax that you probably wouldn’t need to get very hard to do it. Companies really have no profit motive to avoid income tax withholding, but sales taxes, fucj yeah. This isn’t idle speculation, Amazon is the company it is today because they spent years intentionally ignoring sales taxes and used those savings to undercut all of their competitors.

I know what you’ll say. Maybe because enforcement is such a problem, you could create some kind of reward system to encourage the public to enforce these taxes for you. Just spitballing here, but maybe we could call those private tax collectors publicans. Maybe there should even be a law saying that all transactions over a certain size legally need to be witnessed by one of these publicans, to ensure the proper collection of the centesima rerum venalium. Holy **** I’m so hard for this right now, I can’t imagine a single way this could go wrong

uggghh I’m Roman saluting all over this tax reform bill

It’s just so ****in dumb that there’s nothing here to like no matter what you believe.

Classical liberals and libertarians would hate it because it’s an absolute ****show in the goods markets
Social liberals would hate it because it worsens the effects of poverty
Social democrats would hate it because it makes a mockery of everything they believe
Social conservatives would hate it because of the mincome
Socialists would hate it because it rewards worker exploitation while punishing everything else
Middle class centrists would hate it because its a clear transfer from them to the poor in exchange for nothing
Poor centrists would hate it because their costs of living would go up, assuming there weren’t even shortages of some stuff
Fascists would hate it because the government isn’t hurt the people its supposed to be hurting

I’m actuslly not offended by the idea that it doesn’t fit my ideology because for the life of me I can’t identify an ideology where it does fit. Extreme fringe monetarist bootlickers or something, maybe? Does that even count? Who is this steaming turd of a HR even FOR?

The only people who should like this are just rich, period. And everybody knows rich isn’t an ideology, it’s a race.

The only deadweight loss worse than a universal 60% new retail consumption tax is the effect its fans have on our oxygen supply

CUCK

Mostly I just wonder how lazy someone has to be that copying numbers from their single W-2 into Form 1040EZ makes them think “oh man, taking a 2500% increase to US economic inefficiency is totally worth not having to do this complicated mathematical chore again”

Yeah, doing taxes isn't that hard. I ran a small business as well as a small non-profit and had to do a lot of "complicated" **** and it still wasn't that hard. It's actually fairly easy for individuals, especially if one uses TurboTax or HRBlock online. I can see why some people might want to pay a professional, but I never have (though I keep excellent records throughout the year). But I'm a monumental cheapskate and probably wouldn't pay someone even if it was difficult.

For some people, it seems to be a cost/benefit analysis of paying a professional: "considering the value of my time, and with the amount of time I could spend researching obscure ways to make more deductions, would I save money by paying a CPA to do a better job and do it faster?"

Of course, this is exactly why the accounting industry likes a complicated tax code.

For this last year, a standard deduction for married filing jointly is $24,000. I doubt most people will have deductions that high, so itemizing deductions doesn't matter.

[I suspect it's the same as car or home repair - most people are so nervous about working on something so important that they would rather get peace of mind by hiring a professional - even though it's usually pretty simple. Though there are definitely situations where hiring a professional is not only prudent, it's necessary.]

Well, my taxes have never been complicated. The people I had in mind with the more complicated tax return owned a rental property, so that might have contributed to the complexity. I don't remember the details though.

The point of the standard deduction was to be a better deal than itemization could ever be.

Of course, don’t get too attached to that 24k. Trump doubled it this year. It’s going back to normal in his last possible year in office.

The US tax preparation deduction was the dumbest ****ing thing.

Edit: RIP

Well, not as dumb as Fair Tax

I only got this far, I'll skim through the rest at some point. I'm sure you haven't properly understood the bill although you would still hate it. I haven't researched it lately but I'm fairly positive that the 23% tax is only on new goods and services so, no, you aren't taxed on rent. I do believe it may apply to new home purchases. All other [federal] taxes are eliminated. Especially corporate taxes! Yeah, I know, I said you hated it. Anyway, we've talked about this at least a couple of times over the years. I don't know why you think this excludes luxury items, at least new ones. They're taxed the same 23%. Okay, I think I'll skim some more now...

You're using that term incorrectly. It can't apply to Jon`C because he's pretty universally opposed to all Republicans. It is meant to apply to people like me that identify as Republicans but didn't or don't support Trump.

Jon`C is a CUCK because he is allowing thought to cloud his judgement about things that are a priori true due to ideology.