[extropy-chat] Income Tax

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 31 09:42:30 UTC 2005



--- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:

> Someone's got to tally the sales taxes, even under
> your new proposal.

Not nessarily. With such new technology as RFID and
smartcards, the money could automatically tally the
taxes and send the tally to a computer in DC.
 
> > and a nationwide sales tax should be implemented
> on
> > everything except for store bought food.
> 
> Why the exception?  

Yes, I am starting to agree with this now. A rebate of
up to the poverty level as is proposed by the Fair Tax
Act would work better. But don't consider this an
endorsement of said act yet. There is fine print I
haven't read yet, and I fully expect to find something
sneaky. Alternative methods might be a "progressive"
sales tax where the tax percentage is proportional to
the amount of the sale. Maybe something like: 

tax= amount x (10% + log(amount)) or similar.

> Nope.  The rich spend more, so they'd get taxed
> more, ergo they bear an
> "unfair" (higher than average) burden.

Well I am a liberal so I won't cry if the rich feel
that they paying more. The rich use a lot more public
services than I do. Some rich guy with a trucking
company uses the freeways and makes more pot holes
than little old me. Walmart calls the police way more
than I do to bust all the shop-lifters. Hell goverment
contractors make their money from the taxes in the
first place. No tears here.  
> 
> > Second, while the rich may still try to hide
> > their money, the moment they tried to spend it,
> the
> > government would gets its due.

> Unless, of course, they have their wealth invested
> in things other than
> money - e.g., if they exchange stock or gold for
> corporate assets.

Well I guess an underground barter economy might arise
but what can one do? I doubt the abuses of the new
system would surpass those of the current system, at
least not until the rich have had a century or two to
work at it, like they have the current ever-changing
one.

> 
> > It would equalize taxes for
> > corporations and individuals.
> 
> Corporations can set up their own stores, buy food
> "loaned" to it, and
> then pay the farmer.  Individuals can't pull that
> off as easily.

Yes, I think the food exemption was a bad idea. No
exemptions at all. They could however set rates on
different commodities to promote or discourage certain
industries.


> > It would eliminate tax
> > incentives for monopolistic business practices.
> 
> How about for someone to create a food monopoly?

Yes, the food exemption was not a good idea.

> It would also greatly restrict the government's
> ability to encourage
> behavior using tax policy.  This being intolerable
> to legislators, they
> would quickly vote to make more (and unbalanced)
> exceptions, even if it
> cost them their political careers in many cases (and
> their replacements
> would pick up said tax powers and run with them). 

Yes, this is the folly of exceptions. Nothing should
be exempted although the ability to set the tax
percentage would actually be a great lever for
government to modulate the economy and vice versa.
This would allow the people to control the size and
power of government by their consumption behavior. On
the flip side government could influence consumption
behavior by raising or lowering the tax percentage.
Thus if war loomed, the goverment could lower the tax,
and people could go out and buy supplies, and the
government would get what it needed to fight the war,
and the citizens could get what they needed to survive
it. Lowering the tax rate would be the economic
version of adrenaline.

> Ergo, it seems that
> in the present political climate, attempting to
> implement this would do
> more harm than good.

Do you still think so, if there is no food exception?


The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't attempted to contact us." 
-Bill Watterson

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