EDIT: Ope, my original point is a flat tax. I said VAT as I was trying to decide 'what' to tax in my head, and it seems thats what people are latching onto, instead of my three sentences following of "No exceptions".
How about we not? And instead of a some VAT flat-tax nonsense, how about progressive income and wealth taxes with no tax breaks or incentives at the higher brackets?
Now that we've settled that, lets talk about the IRS's software.
Edit:
> EDIT: Ope, my original point is a flat tax. I said VAT as I was trying to decide 'what' to tax in my head, and it seems thats what people are latching onto, instead of my three sentences following of "No exceptions".
That doesn't improve your point as much as you think it does. It's still the kind of tax proposal that the wealthy put out because it's friendly to them (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Forbes#Campaigns_for_pre...).
- a family has non-trivial assets and income in three states but for federal and tax purposes they live in TN where's there's no state tax. The other two states are def not cheap compared to TN. This was setup by buying a house and having a part time job in TN for about 1 year to establish bonafide residency much of which stopped once gained
- business owner takes annual trip to Florida for business training with board/ management. That's a write off. But with some fancy accounting the owner smiles saying once they open the meeting with lunch, they left and spent the rest of week playing golf.
Whether the company or individual the rich guys are taxed less than me.
The bottom 40% (??) don't pay much either.
That leaves the upper middle class to foot a lot of the hill. Well I'm calling BS on that.
What do you mean, exactly? My intuition tells me the definitions you're assigning to "socially" and "unjust" would prove to be peculiar after being unpacked.
(Numerically) progressive taxes are a tool by the elite to enact unjust regressive tax structures on the middle and upper-middle class to prevent them from rising to their level.
The goal is to make sure that doctor making $300k never gets all uppity so that his grandkids start challenging the status quo.
While I strongly disagree with the rest of the comment, I also am furiously in support of getting rid of all credits, deductions, exemptions, incentives, and so on.
I think we need a VAT at the federal government level but we also need to increase the federal income tax on everyone. I would like this tax hike to pay for Medicare for all.
Problem is that over sixty percent of the people seem satisfied with the current status of healthcare. Also I imagine they tend to vote in higher proportion than people like me. I have no idea how to fix this situation. Anyone have any thoughts?
As someone who has been on both sides of this issue, I think this is common. It isn't about loving the private insurance companies--everyone knows they suck--it's about trusting that the government solution will be better. With our government, can you honestly and with full confidence say it would be? My confidence totally flipped. I'm more confident it would be a disaster than not and then would be weaponized politically.
But that won't get you where you say you want to go. Who's going to collect that VAT, and make sure that everybody pays it? The IRS. Your approach would get rid of the tax code, but not the IRS. (In getting rid of the tax code, it would let you get rid of the computer code in question, though.)
The other problem is, you can't implement a "soak the rich" approach with a VAT. And currently, there's a lot of angst around wealth inequality, and most plans to do something about it involve taxing the rich more than everyone else. So your idea is fighting an enormous political headwind.
You could propose something like VAT + income tax for those who make over $1 million/year or something...
What did a person making $1m/year do wrong they are penalized unfairly against another person that doesn't? I have a feeling, much like now, all this accomplishes in reality is the rich hire good enough accounts to hide their largest sums from the IRS. That leaves the middle class and poor once again bearing everything... and we're back to where we started. Carving out 0 exceptions and sticking to it ensures that that literally nobody can say they are being treated unfairly.
My previous point wasn't anything about "should", by the way. I was merely saying that, in the current political climate, not hitting the rich harder was something that would make it harder for a VAT-only scheme to become reality.
Note that a lot of voters are convinced that they will make $1 million/year some day. Perhaps not today, but some day, and they seem happy to pay more today to ensure that they are not "penalized unfairly" when it's their turn.
This is not necessarily a rational approach, since very few of them will ever earn that much money. But if your goal is to get votes, you can go a very, very long way with "penalized unfairly". Note how many oppose an inheritance tax that they'll never pay, simply by the expedient of dubbing it a "death tax".
The "penalized unfairly" argument wouldn't wash with most economists, but there's not all that many of them. And nobody really listens to them anyway.
The taxation system reflects our societal values to an extent: tax breaks incentivize some activities and excess taxes disincentivize. Pure VAT disincentivizes spending and rewards wealth hoarding.
In the US, a typical tax payer will pay federal income tax, federal medicare and social security payroll taxes, state income tax (which varies a lot by state, but can be much more regressive than the federal income tax), and municipal or county property taxes (usually real-estate, but may also include things like vehicles), and a state+municipal sales tax on purchases. Not to mention various other taxes specific to things like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, etc, and various usage fees for toll roads, etc.
I'm sure things are similar in Europe in many ways, and different in others, but it can be a little hard to figure out how much I pay in tax total in a year, and I'm hardly an unusual case. All of this to really underline your point that just talking about US income tax is too incomplete a picture for the purpose of comparison.
You can get rid of the IRS the day after you get rid of the rich.
Sure, the Wrights were not rich. But Bill Boeing was. And Howard Hughes. Donald Douglas got financing to start Douglas. Allan Lockheed pretty much started from scratch. McDonnell developed its passenger jets from scratch.
Airliner travel was a paying concerned because of rich passengers. Flying for ordinary people did not come about until the 1960s.
BTW, jet engines were conceived and developed by private industry, because the government saw no value in them. Until the government saw flying jet aircraft.
P.S. The government airplane project, the Langley Aerodrome, cost something like twenty times what the Wright Flyer did, and simply fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement.
Eg, "My share of the House Rep vote from this Friday until next Tuesday" can be traded until "This Friday" for a "Burger" at Double Burger, or maybe some cash.