Ravenwood - 03/25/05 06:30 AM
CNN/Money says we should follow the French way of doing things and have both a Value Added Tax (VAT) and an income tax. Of course to pass such a measure, we'd still have to exempt large segments of the population from paying income tax, making sure that only the evil, hated, rich people pay taxes on their income.
Thanks but no thanks. And for people who purport to know so much about money, why do they want to model the United States after the French; one of the biggest failures in Europe?
Actually, even if the economics did add up, the fundamental flaw that remains is that you have to trust politicians. The only thing keeping us from ending up with a huge progressive tax system and a fat national sales tax is the promise of a few hundred government employees. These are the same people who have yet to reduce the budget from one year to the next by a single dollar.
Category: Left-wing Conspiracy
Comments (3) top link me
I am so tired of Vat proponents. Tying our tax revenue totals to the consumer confidence index is an even dumber idea than New Coke.
Posted by: AnalogKid at March 26, 2005 1:45 AMThey're just trying to fill their friends' rice bowls. The government sector are the truly greedy citizens: they want to paid more than the value of their work.
Posted by: Brett at March 26, 2005 3:49 PMThe trouble with anything that replaces an income tax is that it instantly confiscates the savings of people who have saved, for they have already paid the ``one-time'' income tax on their savings. Now when the spend the savings, say in retirement, that portion is again taxed away.
In short, you can't move a tax _later_ in the earn/spend sequence without confiscating savings.
That says nothing about the desireability of the tax if it had been imposed instead of the income tax, but only that you can't transition to abruptly, meaning over say less than 50 years.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at March 28, 2005 4:30 AM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
