The defense the Fair Tax people offer is that it really isn't an increase at all--you're already paying that 2nd tax today. It's hidden in the price of everything you buy.
The price of anything always includes all the taxes--ihe income, SS, Medicare, and other taxes--paid by the people who made it. Take those out and the price of goods will fall.
The Fair Tax--now separated and out in the open for all to see--is simply the tax which you would've paid before anyhow, but without knowing it.
I think the buzzword is "GRA" or something like that. Guaranteed return annuity. Basically, give Obama your IRA today, and he'll gladly pay you back Tuesday with interest.
The chatter is this as a way of refinancing our debt. That is, 38% of the national debt comes due this year, and if the Chinese won't buy it, Mr. Obama will have to get it somewhere pronto, or we default. So, the reasoning goes, why not nationalize--excuse me, 'reform'--a few trillion in IRAs?
It probably won't go anywhere--it's an election year, and, besides, the euro's collapse is driving everyone into dollars.
But, a government that can make you buy its crappy health insurance can make you buy its crappy bonds. So, maybe next year, or maybe in five or ten.
How so? Inflation? That increases investment values, as well.
Sure, but the *INCOME* tax has been paid and the new sales tax will also have to be paid. Without the change, there isn't a second tax on the income. Yes, the "fair" tax will include the income tax of the people paying now, but it will also increase the real cost of the product the same as another income tax would on the buyer.
No, it's not. Yo can't tell me that money that has already been taxed has the same value as money that hasn't. Which would you rather have, $1M in an conventional IRA (no tax yet paid), or $600K ($1M after tax) in a Roth, when they change the tax to a consumption tax?
That the individual states guarantee that their particular portion of the loan will be paid by that particular loan if Greece goes bankrupt? What else would it mean?
You are making a prediction, based on the little you know about the situation, heavily influenced by what you've read in the US mass media. As opinions go, it doesn't carry a lot of weight.
Why? The US - which has been running a hugge balance of payemnts deficit since Regan was president - would suggest that you might be right, but the money market hasn't yet got around to labelling US treasury bonds as risky investments.
The Greek credit rating has now gone through the floor, and they've got no option but reform.
The IMF has a one-size-fits all solution for every country that gets into serious debt. It does seem to be based on the prescriptions of a group of particularly unrealistic US economic theorists, and tends to do serious damage to the real economy in the process of restoring the credit rating, but international credit rating never did have much to do with reality, as we got to see when the sub-prime mortgage crisi hit the fan.
Be that as it may, the Greeks have run out of options, and they will do what every other government has done when they fall into the hands of the IMF, which is to follow the - stupid - prescriptions.
So currency traders think that they can talk up the sort of wobbles in the exchange rate on which they can make money. It's bizarre that you can't recognise this for what it is.
But you've been out of touch with reality for years. If the current generation's choices about family size were to persist for ten or twelve generations, they might make a significant difference to Europe's racial make-up, but this does implicityl assume that they are genetically determined, rather than primarily influenced by the local culture, which changes rather faster. Immigrant groups reliably get to look like the host population in a couple of generations, as you'd know if you had gone to the trouble of finding out about the subject, rather than recyclig idiot editorials from right-wing web-sites
If there is a short fuse fiscal time bomb under anybody's economy, the victim is more likely to be the US which has been running a massive balance of payments deficit since Regan was president. That is more than twenty years now, so perhaps that particular fuse isn't all that short.
As I've done. I've also figured out that you don't know what you are talking about, and seem to think that repeating a fatuous claim is all that you need to do to establish it's credibility.
Gregor post his opinions without reference to any external evidence, and complains that what I post - which does refer to objective and widely recognised facts, which I do point to - is "indoctrination and propaganda" while it is actually pointing out that his kind of opinion does reflect his exposure to precisely that kind of misinfomration.
Like invading Irak?
Reality bashed Dubbya's head quite hard in Irak without breaking the mental spell that had taken hold of the neo-cons, and still seems to infest whatever it is that you use instead of a brain.
Consider Gregor's advice and **proof** exactly was you would economic advice from a US monetarist. Not that Gregor bothers to point to anything remotely ressembling objective evidence to support his silly ideas. If I thought that he could think, I could claim that it was because he knows that such evidence doesn't exist, but in fact he doesn't understand the concept of evidence in the first place, and thinks that his delusions have to be true just because he believes them.
Unbridled free market capitalism generates a series of booms and busts in the economic environment. The free market is a good device for matching supply and demand, but it does need a stabilising mechanism. Keynes described one such mechanism which works pretty well, though it can stall the economy in a state where it grows more slowly that it ideally could. His followers have worked out some improvements, but politicians don't like their prescriptions and prefer the plausible nonsense they get to hear from monetarists, so we get more booms and busts.
Society as whole provides the environment where you can hire technically educated employees, communicate with them, and have them travel around and get looked after when they get sick.
Your taxes support that society. Try setting up an innovative business in a third world country where the tax rates are lower (or easily evaded by bribing the right people).
Showing up for a paycheck at a factory doesn't entitle you to the whole factory, but the last hundred years has demonstrated that the optimum split for rewarding capital versus labour comes out at around fifty-fifty.
As the brilliant innovator who made whatever it was possible, you think that you deserve a larger proportion of the gravy, but societies where people like you have managed to hang onto more of the profits don't turn out as well as places where labour gets a roughly equal slice of the pie.
People invest in feeding and educating their children, and in keeping them healthy enough to continue eating and learning. That too is a long term investment, and the US is currently investing rather less than it should in that particular area.
Martin Brown cites evidence that supports his point of view. You don't adduce any evidence to support your claim that his reports are biased.
Whoever your intructors were, they didn't teach you how to respond to a fact-based argument.
In fact - as Martin Brown pointed out - the decency of the average to best cases wasn't all that relevant, because the evil, grasping employers could sell their product for less than the product produced by the average to best cases, who risked being driven out of business if they were too considerate of their workers.
Afew years ago, Texas introduced minimum wage legislation, which appreciably raised the wages of fast food employees. The whole fast food industry was terrified that their slender profit margins would evaporate in the higher labour costs, but in the event the fast food businesses started making more money after the legislation came into force.
It turned out that the fast food employees hadn't been getting a lving wage, and they'd only stay in the jobs for a short while until they could get something better. the minimum wage wasn't all that much higher, but it was high enough to appreciably reduce staff turnover. More experienced staff did a better job, which sucked in more customers, which meant that the store owners were making more money even though they were paying out more in wages.
Unrestrained free markets don't automatically produce an optimal distribution of resources, particularly when the employers don't appreciate the real costs and benefits of hiring and firing.
In the UK, during the first world war, a spate of industrial accidents caused by over-tired workers forced legislation to control the maximum number of hours of per day that a worker could do. The immdeiate effect of the enforcement of this legislation was that production - not just productivity - went up, because over-tired workes were much less productive than people who had had enough sleep.
In this case it was patriotism as much as greed that had inspired the excessive hours of work, but the pressure had again produced a sub- optimal solution.
Intelligent manufacturing seeks to automate the duller and more repetitive parts of the job, but moving to China does require less investment. Effectively, investment in manufacturing automation has been on hold since since the US started exporting its low-paid jobs to China, and the rest of the world joined the rush.
Back when I was working in England, English manufacturers complained that British workers were less productive than their German counterparts, until an academic economist did a comparison that controlled for the capital investment per worker. It turned out that - on average - the Germns invested more capital per worker, which was reasonable since German wage rates were higher, but in areas where Brisih employers had invested as much as their German counterparts, British workers were more productive, presumably because the British employers were picking off only the low-hanging fruit.
It isn't, actually. Pre-steam life wasn't carbon-neutral, but the volume of coal being burned was too low to have much effect on the climate.
Willian Ruddiman makes a case that other human activities had laready lead to appreciable global warming - just enough to put off the next ice age, which some authors beleive to be over-due.
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You do really go out of your way to prove that you don't know what you are talking about. James Arthur is just as bad. Today he had Germany's
1923 hyper-inflation taking place in the late 1930's.
We need a new word to replace millionaire. The guy who owns a hot dog wagon is probably a millionaire. My plumber certainly is.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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