| Tax simplification and flat tax are not the same thing. Tax Simplification: good. Flat tax: bad. |
| Tax simplification means closing loopholes. This would require that tax dodgers pay their fair share.
Flat tax means everyone pays the same percentage of their income in federal taxes. Under this system, a billionaire pays the same percentage as the janitor who empties his trash. "Any responsible person advocating tax reform has to admit the following: A reform that is revenue-neutral has losers. There's a basic math to that. Every Republican flat-tax proposal lowers the rate on people at the top. Now, if you're raising less revenue from the most well-off, one of two things are going to happen. You're either going to raise more revenue from the middle class, or you're going to pass on more debt to our children." said Gene Sperling, a leading Democratic budget expert who served as a top economic adviser for John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Source: "Breaking the Code" by Nicholas Confessore - New York Times Magazine - 1/16/05 Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey proposed a 17 percent rate years ago, but critics say the rate would have to be at least 20 percent. That's higher than 80 percent of households currently pay in federal taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Source: "Simpler tax code? Dream on" by Carl P. Leubsdorf - Dallas Morning News - 9/16/04 The biggest fiscal problem facing the federal government today is the budget deficit. The only possible solutions (like it or not) are spending cuts, tax increases, or -- most likely -- some combination of the two. A flat tax at a 20% rate is a tax hike that excludes the 20% at the top of the wage scale (who would again receive a tax cut.) It is grossly unfair. Any flat tax rate less than 20% results in a net decrease in income to the federal government. This increased deficit in the federal budget would result in more government borrowing. The contention that a flat tax would be simpler because it involves only a single rate is flatly wrong. The complexity of the current system has nothing to do with its multiple income brackets. The hard step in figuring your tax bill is to compute your adjusted gross income — roughly, the amount you earn, less the myriad exemptions, deductions and various other offsets described in the 3.4-million-word code of the Internal Revenue Service. You’d also have to calculate your adjusted gross income under a flat tax. But once you’ve completed that step under either system, you consult the tax tables to see how much you owe. In the current system, the entries have multiple brackets and rates already built into them, so this step is no harder than it would be under the tables for a flat tax. The much more serious concern is that a flat tax would reinforce the trends toward greater income inequality that have been seen over the last several decades. As documented by a recent Congressional Budget Office study, the top 1 percent of income recipients in the United States earned 275 percent more in 2007 than they did in 1979, adjusted for inflation, a period when the earnings of middle-income households grew by less than 40 percent. A flat tax would increase inequality by substantially reducing rates on the most prosperous households, while increasing them on low- and middle-income households. Source: "The Problem With Flat-Tax Fever" By ROBERT H. FRANK - NY Times - November 5, 2011 A flat tax is not the answer. |
|
Read what others have said about this statement here.
Use the section at the bottom of the screen to submit your own comment. | ||
| Comments | Contributor | Date Submitted |
| This is another example of how easy it is, unfortunately, to confuse common folks with pea-under-the shell games. They just get so easily deceived by Republican-Orwellian language. | Holly Hunter Mesquite |
2/2/2005 |
Submit your comment below | ||