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Comment by X86BSD | Hacker News Reader

What would solve all "loopholes" is just going to a damn flat national sales tax. Period. End of story. Thank you drive through. Stop trying to mangle this demonic beast of a tax code we have now, it won't work and never has. And simply toss it. One paragraph as the replacement.

38% or whatever agreed upon percent as a national flat sales tax. And for the bleeding hearts that will scream this hurts the poor, Sentence two: The first 5,000/year in clothing tax free, and the First 10,000/year in food tax free.

IRS? Dissolved. H&R block? Dissolved. No more audits. No more income tax. You keep your entire paycheck! No more asset seizure by the IRS. No more tax fraud. No more tax evasion.

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Still a massive tax cut for the wealthy and a massive tax raise for the middle class no matter how you cut it. And still makes it easy to avoid taxes: buy your goods overseas and ship them here. Not worth it for your groceries and stuff, but for big ticket items it matters a lot.

Not to mention that the fact that we have a progressive tax system isn't the reason it's complicated. The complication is that we have tax exemptions and deductions and the like. And those are valuable tools to making things like owning a house and getting an education more affordable, as well as incentivizing certain beneficial actions like using renewable energy.

So in other words, the bum down the street pays the same tax rate as the billionaire's spending up the hill?

Take your average thrifty bum. Pays X% on the totality of what they earn, minus some lump sum. And your average billionaire. Pays X% on the totality of what they spend, minus the same lump sum.

That doesn't quite seem right, unless you tax financial transactions at the same rate as groceries. It might be just me, but methinks Wall Street will have none of that.

As to not needing tax auditors, just no. You'll still need to audit companies, and their incentive will be sky high to get cash transactions and declare only some of them.

So you need to keep receipts for every hot dog you buy?

Sentence two: The first 5,000/year in clothing tax free, and the First 10,000/year in food tax free.

I like plans that take care of this with a prebate - $200-$500/mo checks for everyone. It could also be a precursor to UBI.

325M people getting $500/mo is $1.95 trillion / year. That would be the largest entitlement program in American history, and about 10.5% of GDP.

In the context of 25-50% of people losing their job to AI in the next decade or three, such an entitlement or a much bigger one might come to being.

"38% or whatever agreed upon percent as a national flat sales tax. And for the bleeding hearts that will scream this hurts the poor, Sentence two: The first 5,000/year in clothing tax free, and the First 10,000/year in food tax free."

1. It's incredibly telling of you that you call those who would (rightfully) point out that your scheme is incredibly regressive as "bleeding hearts".

2. Those deductions are nowhere near enough, especially if you have a family.

Wouldn't you have a better chance of passing 0 federal taxes for anyone under 2x poverty level with a similar benefit?

> The first 5,000/year in clothing tax free

Per person? In that case, we can lower it to $1k/year.

This seems like a good idea. :)

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