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Post by swilk on Dec 9, 2010 13:21:15 GMT -5
We are talking a hypothetical fair tax woody ... not current day tax system.
Under the "Swilk fair tax system" I woudnt care if a person made $5 per year or $5million .... a flat tax is a flat tax is a flat tax. Every person would pay the same percentage of each and every dollar made as everyone else.
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Post by huxbux on Dec 9, 2010 16:05:27 GMT -5
We are talking a hypothetical fair tax woody ... not current day tax system. Under the "Swilk fair tax system" I woudnt care if a person made $5 per year or $5million .... a flat tax is a flat tax is a flat tax. Every person would pay the same percentage of each and every dollar made as everyone else. That would be "fair" only with one proviso - absolutely NO deductions. Never gonna happen, the politicians would never vote for such a thing.
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Post by swilk on Dec 9, 2010 16:28:39 GMT -5
yeah .. no deductions.
You only earn $5 in the course of a year you still get taxed for each one of em ....
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Post by firstwd on Dec 9, 2010 16:53:18 GMT -5
What needs to happen to make any tax system to work is only collect taxes for the running of the Government and not for Government funded programs that take money from one group to hand it to another.
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Post by Russ Koon on Dec 9, 2010 18:35:37 GMT -5
Woody,I suspect that we have actually already passed that point where less than half of the total population pays.
The government figures that I could find only spoke in terms of the number or percentages of returns filed that showed no income tax liability. There seemed to be no connection to the number of people involved with either the taxpayer families or the non-paying ones.
Common sense would tell us that the numbers of people per filing would likely be higher among the group with no liability, since the deductions would put many larger families in that category. Thus the OctoMom or the Quiverful folks with the seventeen or eighteen or whatever they have now kids would have to be making some really great money to be required to pay any taxes after those deductions.
And the folks who make all their money by means they would rather not admit to would probably be less likely to file, even just to get their "incentive money" check.
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Post by chicobrownbear on Dec 10, 2010 5:28:04 GMT -5
You do realize that you're legally obligated to declare those purchases and pay that tax, don't you? The fact that some places collect it for the state and some don't doesn't change your tax status. The fact that you knowingly avoid paying your taxes does change your legal status, though, and might change your address as well, if you're caught. Don't agree with the tax? I can sympathize with that. I have had a strong disagreement with income and property raxes for a couple of generations now. I pay them because I'd probably be the unlucky cheat to end up in jail if I didn't, and because it would still be the same as stealing from my fellow citizens who do pay them if I somehow avoided prosecution. If there's some honest and logical reason that this particular form of tax cheating is legally or morally different from the others, I must have missed it. Maybe someone could clue me in. From where I stand it looks to be the same, except that you can be sure that the other citizens you're stealing from are your fellow Hoosier taxpayers and the businesses that you're punishing for collecting the sales taxes are mostly Hoosier businesses, and those mail order places that are NOT facilitating tax cheating by refusing to collect the tax at purchase. I live in Japan Russ.
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Post by JBDiNos on Dec 10, 2010 5:52:21 GMT -5
I spent $850 on 17in Bigfoot ATs for my trailblazer. Most I've ever spent on tires....
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Post by Russ Koon on Dec 10, 2010 11:00:30 GMT -5
Chico......Oh,.....never mind (in my best Gilda Radner imitation).
Of course, the tax is called a "use tax", not a sales tax, so if you are buying the item to be shipped to your IN address for use here when you return or for someone else to use here during your absence, then I think the tax still applies legally regardless of your current mailing address. Not sure why you would be buying something to be shipped to IN but not used here, but I suppose there could well be some perfectly legal reason like better shipping costs. Every regulation has some exceptions. If your case is one, isn't there some way to legally avoid the use tax being applied at purchase? I don't know, just asking.
I can see how that situation would be pretty rare, and the companies might not have a procedure to override the automatic charging of the tax at purchase, but I'm thinking there's probably some form that would be used to claim a refund of it on your state tax paperwork. Never needed it myself, but I seem to remember seeing it mentioned on the tax forms.
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Post by Russ Koon on Dec 10, 2010 11:41:51 GMT -5
Swilk, I think the problem with the "flat tax on income" approach is that determining actual income is already the most difficult part of collecting the existing taxes. That's where most of the shenanigans are employed to dodge paying.
There is a whole 'nother economy that's "off the books", and runs the gamut from the downright illegal sources of income like burglary and prostitution and drug dealing, to the tradesman or small business operator who "forgets" to write down the money made on small jobs or sales that are handled on a cash basis where there is no paper trail. I used to work with several guys who also worked part-time in job shops "on a cash basis".
One guy I worked with went into the landscaping business (on paper) and did his own yard as a display, then wrote off the cost as a business loss against his income at the plant when doing his taxes. Sort of legal, or at least seldom caught or contested. He was very proud of the fact the rest of us had helped pay for his bushes.
Dealing with the prying and paperwork to prove your legality, all the way from keeping your records to hiring a tax service, is also almost entirely because of the need to show what is actually income and what was just money running through your hands while trying to make income.
The cost to us all to have g-men out there snooping into our business and an army of people reading that info that we supply every year and eventually (maybe) returning the portion of our money that we sent that was in excess of what we legally owed, has to be tremendous. Just the printing and distribution of all those forms has to be the equivalent of the GDP of some small countries.
There's a lot to be gained from efficiency and simplification, but keeping income as a base for taxation will prevent us from ever being able to realize most of it.
Businesses already have to track and keep just about all the needed info anyway, and already have government snoopers looking over their shoulders to make sure they get it right, so there would be a tremendous saving of expense and bother to the taxpayer and a considerable reduction in the number of government snoopers and paperpushers if our incomes were our own business and the taxes were just collected on retail goods and services.
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Post by Decatur on Dec 10, 2010 12:48:50 GMT -5
Chico......Oh,.....never mind (in my best Gilda Radner imitation). ;D
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Post by trapperdave on Dec 11, 2010 11:49:25 GMT -5
how would an income tax take a percentage of every dollar made? Right back to the illegals and people paid under the table. Sales tax! gets everyone, and doesnt penalize those who save rather than spend.
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Post by swilk on Dec 11, 2010 13:39:32 GMT -5
You could scam either system ... sales tax would be just as easy to sidestep. Never buy anything new. Or set up a shell company to bypass the tax.
Neither system would be perfect. Either would be better than what we have now.
I would prefer income.
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Post by Decatur on Dec 11, 2010 16:11:48 GMT -5
Buy American tires. The tariff was supposed to be on Chinese tires I thought?
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Post by retnuhreed on Dec 11, 2010 18:23:49 GMT -5
Then you have the earned income tax credit. You can make 20000 in a year pay 1700 in taxes and get back a 5000 dollar tax return. You can call that negative taxes.
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Post by firstwd on Dec 12, 2010 13:27:42 GMT -5
You could scam either system ... sales tax would be just as easy to sidestep. Never buy anything new. Or set up a shell company to bypass the tax. Neither system would be perfect. Either would be better than what we have now. I would prefer income. In a correctly administered sales tax system no one or business would be exempt from paying the tax. Not buying anything new would not be scamming the system, it would be saving the planet by reducing, recycling, and reusing. Besides, the tax would still apply to all the new parts bought to keep things going.
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Post by raporter on Dec 12, 2010 15:10:57 GMT -5
The biggest scam the states have is charging sales tax on used items which the original buyer already paid tax on.
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Post by swilk on Dec 12, 2010 19:29:58 GMT -5
In a correctly administered immigration system we wouldnt have to worry about illegals either.
Like I said ... I would prefer the income tax.
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