conservation of Euros

BS > Of course you love it. You are a right-wing BS > nitwit, and enthuse about every proposition BS > that favours the rich, as "The Fair Tax" most BS > certainly does. Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

For an Aussie who lives near Amsterdam you sure are emotional about taxation in the USA!

You are cartoon like in your liberal extremism.

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By changing the offset of the straight-line relationship you can reduce the total amount collected from the poor, but "progressive" and "regressive" refer to the incremental effects - as rich people get richer they spend less of their income on consumption, which makes a tax on consumption regressive.

Anybody can invent anedotal evidence. Only a right-wing nitwit would waste bandwidth by posting the product of his fevered imagination.

They don't need to be be well-informed. It's an old idea, whose main charm is that it is simple enough for the dumbest right-wing nit-wit to understand. Unfortunately, like all old, simple ideas, it isn't practicable, which is why our ancestors evolved the slightly more complicated taxation system we have today.

This is a standard right-wing straw man. In reality modern socialists

- as seen in Britain, Scandinavia and Germany - are perfectly happy to let the market place determine salary levels, and collect progressively more income tax from those who earn more. There was a time when socialist governments imposed conficatory incremental rates on very high incomes - up to 95% of the top slice of a high income - but this has long been recognised to be a waste of time, and maximum incremental rates now don't go much above 60%.

The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load. This falls a long way short of Marx - from each according to the abilities, to each according to their needs - and is compatible with a society where some people can afford fancier cars, bigger houses and finer wines than their neighbours, though the rich no longer have access to the services of a truly deprived under-class who will do almost anything to save their kids from starvation.

ggOs&NR=3D1

The link doesn't work for me, and if it had worked I imagine that its content would be just as half-baked as your argument.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Nijmegen is about as far east of Amsterdam as you can get - the German border is just eight kilometres east of our house.

And I'm not emotional about the US tax system - I'm just emotional about people who post half-baked nonsense as if it were some kind of revelation.

You obviously haven't yet run into a doctinaire socialist.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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They tried that in the UK. It rapidly got silly. Food was VAT-exempt, but eating in a restaurant was not a necessity, so you had to pay VAT on the bill - unless you bought a take-away meal.

The UK still has an extra tax on alcohol and tobacco, over and above VAT, and everybody seems to slap an extra tax on gasoline.

Try not to re-invent the wheel.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Isn't a VAT very much like the "Fair Tax", a flat rate for all? ...Jim Thompson

At least his initials fit his views.

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That's the way sales tax works in California. If I buy uncooked chicken at Safeway, there's no sales tax. If I buy cooked, hot, ready-to-eat chicken, it's taxed. It's simple, because it's a visible, automated-cash-register, point-of-sale tax. Restaurant food is taxed whether you eat it there or not. I can't imagine how you could work a thing like this all the way back up the VAT chain.

It would be easy to structure a national sales tax to exempt the things poorer people actually need. There would be some cheating around the edges, but there always will be some cheating. But things like VAT carousel fraud couldn't happen.

(One shop near here sells " *WARM* " corned-beef sandwiches because hot ones have a higher tax rate.)

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be jealous of his wealth.

John

The difference is that a VAT is collected every time a widget changes hands (when "value (is) added") and is a tax on the seller. A the buyer pays sales tax and it isn't levied on items to be resold. The effect is similar, but a VAT has to be tracked through every step of the food chain. A sales tax only has to be reported by the eventual seller. Bye, bye, IRS (not going to happen).

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In Vermong there is a so called "bagel tax". If you buy one bagel, it's taxed as "prepared food". If you buy six they're not taxed because they've now become "groceries". NY has similar silliness, orange juice is not taxed, Hawaiian Punch and Tang are.

VATs tend to be sales taxes, in reality.

Leftists and those on the receiving end aren't reasonable.

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It's sometimes silly and arbitrary, but it's still pretty simple to administer... the cash register reads the UPC and adds tax or doesn't... and it generally exempts the basics that lower-income people need.

A 20% tax on junk food, and zero on broccoli, would encourage people to eat their broccoli.

VAT is applied all up and down the production chain. So the only stage that can be selectively taxes is the last one, at point of sale. I prefer a true 100% visible point of sale sales tax. VAT is designed to hide the actual taxation level, at considerable cost of complexity.

Oh. Right.

John

crimes of your government?

I haven't a clue nameless coward, you haven't told us.

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That's the theory but in practice, AIUI, VATs are only collected at the end of the pipe.

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Not if Broccoli makes you vommit.

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No. They're charged and credited throughout the chain. Your thing gets taxed, then rebated and the next guy pays, then gets his rebate, etc.

Maximum work for everyone. Maximum intrusion. Horrible.

James Arthur

So it's only collected at the end.

A lot of work, sure, but money only changes hands at the end of the pipe. ...and IIRC, the Canuckistani VAT is paid by the buyer; a sales tax.

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I'd consider it a 20% vomit tax, and gladly pay it.

Right. That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other animals' bread, greedy thing that she was. She had broad shoulders.

Marx was kind of an idiot.

"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer." --The Communist Manifesto

See what I mean?

Of course Marx himself was a n'er-do-well who never earned his keep, a pseudo-academic parasite sponging off patron Engels. Engels in turn coasted off the family business. Marx made his living guilt-tripping Engels with econobabble, a fine tradition carried on by Marxists today.

"To each according to need" really means "From you to me." "Dear Fred, I need that grocery money, and I deserve it, luv Karl, xoxoxoxo P.S. Stop exploiting me! KM"

Marx's moronic precepts ruined scores of countries, and killed tens of millions, maybe hundreds.

"Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily." --The Communist Manifesto

But, dim-witted Marx had it exactly bass-ackwards--industry was the very salvation for the proletariat, pulling them up out of poverty. "Industry?" you ask? Productivity-amplifying machines, powered by fossil fuels. Let's get rid of those, shall we?

Socialist countries are the ones who crush their peoples in poverty, and whose people flee to the USA, not the reverse.

Pity. A conspiracy idiot. He makes your case well.

James Arthur

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Theoretically. It's kind of a guilty-until-proven-innocent thing-- you're constantly striving to prove what you don't owe, and if you falter, you pay.

Meanwhile, it's maximum paperwork for everyone.

If so that's not really a value-added tax. VAT means taxing every increase in value, at every stage of production. Raveninghorde posted some of the flaming hoops he had to leap through.

Just taxing something once, at the point-of-sale is, well, a sales tax.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I've always had some food allergies, and all the medicine I'm on now only makes it worse. :(