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Comment by tmaly | Hacker News Reader

I still think $6000 is a large amount in some sense for someone just getting started.

I would much rather see this along with a flat tax. The recent discussion on here about USFacts.org highlighted that revenue was growing in proportion to population. What someone had said is that it makes the case for a much simpler tax system. We spend 6 billion man hours a year on taxes in the US. Is that really the best use of our time?

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There has never really been a compelling scheme for a flat tax that solves the problem inherent to it -- that a flat tax hurts those with a lower ability-to-pay.

Not a negative income tax with a flat rate above/below a threshold. The tax that hurts the poor the most is obviously the sales tax.

> The tax that hurts the poor the most is obviously the sales tax.

Right, which is a flat, or proportional, tax.

It's not really proportional, which is why it hurts the most. Wealthy people (who don't buy extravagant things) have most of the same basic expenses as the poor, and the sales tax can really be seen as a regressive income tax that eats up a larger portion of the income of the poor.

And the flat tax proposal is the same.

A simple flat tax, yes -- not arguing with that. But your statement here is incorrect, because negative income tax variants certainly are not the same:

> There has never really been a compelling scheme for a flat tax that solves the problem inherent to it

> Right, which is a flat, or proportional, tax.

It's not a flat tax on income, since marginal spending declines with income.

Every tax can be construed as flat relative to some measure.

Flat tax is a horrible libertarian idea that simply hurts lower-income people, because to get the same revenue you end up having to massively raise the taxes on the lower classes, which they can't afford since they're already struggling to make ends meet. We've had progressive taxation in this country since the invention of income tax, for good reason. If you want simpler taxes, you don't need a flat tax, you just need to eliminate all the deductions and credits. Calculating a progressive tax is not hard: you just see which bracket your income falls into, and then do the simple calculation. Or, you just look it up in a table which most people do.

Flat tax was just something that came to mind. I am not stuck on the idea, I just think we could have something much simpler than what we have that requires less of peoples time each year. I heard in Canada, the system does it all for you and its much less of a time suck than what we have here.

It's not just Canada, it's all the developed nations. The US has a horribly complex tax system, while the developed nations do not. It's because of all the credits and deductions for everything. And it's hard to get rid of them because someone will be mad and will write their Congressman, and also because companies like Intuit (Turbotax), plus uncountable CPAs, profit from this system.

I consider myself a true fan of liberty and a flat tax is so regressive it seems an obvious attempt to stew hate for all taxes. It's so rare I meet such unreasonable people in my day-to-day (though I did yesterday).

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