🚀 go-pugleaf

David Meyers (dmeyers@panix.com) wrote:
: You've got to be kidding.  This just shifts more of the
: burden of collecting taxes over to businesses (as if they
: don't already bear enough of the burden).  

A small price for eliminating your corporate income tax don't you think?

: And all the talk of exempted product categories makes for just as
: bad special interest groups.  

Exactly.  So don't exempt anything.  Every company involved with getting
a loaf of bread to your table currently adds their income tax to your bill.
If you replace the corporate income tax with a national sales tax, what you
pay for a loaf of bread, including the sales tax, will go down.

Is it correct that the corporate income tax is 33%?  I've seen estimates the
last couple of days that this adds anywhere from 30% to 50% to the end cost
of goods.  Even at 30% with an 18% sales tax you save $10 on every $100 spent.

: Not to mention the amount that the black market would grow in an effort to
: evade the tax.

How much?  The IRS cannot locate the 10 million taxpayers who did not file
last year.  The IRS looses $100 billion to tax cheats every year.

: A NST may be better than what we have now, but don't try
: to pretend that it doesn't suffer from many of the same
: problems.

: >problem is that it seems only the flat tax is getting all the publicity

: One major reason is that a flat income tax is still a vast
: improvement over what we have now, and that imposing a NST
: would suddenly cause all existing savings (which has already
: been taxed when it was income) to be taxed AGAIN when it
: is spent.

Savings in tax deferred plans do not suffer this problem.

: How would you go about fixing that?

Time.  This is a one-time problem so it goes away.


I was very skeptical about this NST thing so I read the suggested material
on http://www.intac.com/~gbaren/cats.html.  Now I have to say I'm all for it.