Hacker News Reader

Comment by PrinceRichard | Hacker News Reader

Here's my proposal for taxes. Completely eliminate income tax and every other form of currently existing tax for individuals and businesses. Replace it with a small tax on all electronic transfers, like 1-2%. Compliance is offloaded to private institutions and the entire headache of preparing and filing taxes is eliminated, along with the thousands of pages of laws about and what is and isn't taxed and how much.

This should also result in a significant decrease in federal revenue, which is an important part of the plan as well. I would cut the federal budget about about 90%.

View on HN

If you are going to cut the budget by 90% why not start with how you are going to do that? Getting rid of the income tax is largely inconsequential in comparison.

To get rid of 90% you would have to kill social security and Medicare. I don’t see that ever happening. In addition you would have to cut the defense budget, since that alone is more than 10%. I’d be on board with that, but again I don’t see it happening.

Most tax utopians rally around LVT. Transfer and transaction taxes are regressive. Reducing the federal budget greatly would cause a great economic contraction likely resulting in social and political chaos.

Since you're boosting it here, do you have a link to any sort of analysis where the math works out on a land value tax?

I totally get the philosophical attraction but I just do not see how you pull trillions of dollars out of that without some crazy outcomes. Land with a financial skyscraper handling the GDP of a small nation could have a lower 'unimproved' value than an acre with really nice soil, for example.

The land with the skyscraper would likely be in the middle of a city, and would certainly be worth more than a random acre in a rural area no matter how good the soil is.

Could the regression be mitigated by requiring a minimum value of transactions to be tax free?

More affluent people spend more, so they will go beyond the minimum.

Wouldn't this lead to "off-chain" transactions where you keep all your money in your account, but trade around IOU that are not subject to that tax?

Good luck constructing additional pylons

Reply on news.ycombinator.com