re: Income Tax vs Flat/Sales Tax. Which is Better?

As a person earning less than $150,000 per year, I favor the income tax rather than a sales or value added tax. My understanding is $150K is the break even point.

That is strictly from a selfish point of view.

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They pay them indirectly via their rent payments

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My point is they should be paying them directly to the government such as I am and then maybe millages wouldn't be so high to just a few. After all, millages are based on people who directly pay them.

It's not a laughing matter as you imply.

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Sales tax flat tax consumption tax all the same meaning to me. Pay as you go. Lower earners would pay less tax as they buy less. Higher pay more since they buy more shite.

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you pretend not to understand the true nature of income disparity.

Say we institute a 30% national sales tax. A gallon of milk is $4.50. With tax it’s about $6.50. A person who makes $15.00 an hour has to work almost a half hour to buy a gallon of milk. That’s just one gallon of milk.

A high wage earner who makes $100 has to work less than 4 minutes to afford the gallon of milk.

A national sales tax of that magnitude will destroy the manual and unskilled workers and push the high earners to royalty status.

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Lower earners would pay less tax as they buy less. Higher pay more since they buy more shite.

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My man’s never been to wal mart

All of a sudden illegal immigrants are paying for resources they use…

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Say we institute a 30% national sales tax. A gallon of milk is $4.50. With tax it’s about $6.50.

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And that person would qualify for the welfare check. And that person would finally realize what government costs instead of being clueless.

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Not really. If one man owes X amount of school millage because of property he owns then take that X amount and divide it by the number of people using that property and send them all a bill.

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Do you think this would actually change behavior or voting patterns?

There are a myriad of disclosures about how long and how much it will cost to pay off a credit card and people still max the cards out.

I am not sold on the idea. Perhaps test it on a small scale and see if it changes behavior and doesn't become an administrative mess for the state to collect.

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income disparity.

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Translation: make everyone equally poor.

I know, I know, that's not your intent but that's the result. Look at the entire welfare system, its tiered design penalizes the poor instead of helps ease them onto the road to prosperity.

Let's take Section 8 for example ( LINK). In this, we'll say Rhonda Sue has three kids, two boys and a girl, so she gets a 3BR dwelling. She doesn't make a whole lot so she's in tier 5, so she's getting $3,230/month in housing assistance from Section 8.

It doesn't matter what the income tiers are because there's no gradual change between them. Once you cross the threshold into the next higher-income tier (tier 5, in Rhonda Sue's case), you lose a flat sum of benefits.

Let's say she gets a raise at work, an extra dollar an hour. That's an extra $160/month and that puts her into tier 4. In exchange for her $160/month raise she loses $460/month in Section 8 benefits. This means that her raise is actually a net loss of $300/month and that's in only one program. Just for Section 8 alone she would need to get a raise of $2.86/hour in order to balance out Section 8 alone.

That income level denotes low or no-skill jobs and/or limited work hours (she's got 3 kids, after all). These jobs do not give out raises that large.

Now, spread that out over SNAP, TANF, WIC, etc (however many programs she and her kids qualify for) and that raise is actually something to avoid and you wind up with her having to make an even larger raise in order to simply maintain her lifestyle due to the offset disparity (which is the true disparity).

This is why you'll find so many low-end workers who are on social services not willing to work over x hours. It's why the talk of "income disparity" is a strawman.

Before we can even get into shifting the budget burden though, we need a balanced budget amendment. Trying to do any sort of change in the origin of federal revenues doesn't mean crap unless they are bound within a framework of budgetary responsibility, otherwise they'll just continue to overspend.

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This means that her raise is actually a net loss of $300/month and that's in only one program. Just for Section 8 alone she would need to get a raise of $2.86/hour in order to balance out Section 8 alone.

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While I generally agree that reviving welfare benefits is a trap, the reality is that, eventually, if an individual increases their income to a certain level, they lose the assistance. That’s the way it should work.

Take Rhonda Sue. Let’s say she somehow gets her college degree and parlays it into a job making twice what she makes now. Eventually ALL benefits would cease, as they should.

The problem isn’t the cut in benefits compared to the raise. The problem is that there is no maximum time limit on most of these benefits.

Of course a society should assist people who have fallen on difficult times. I don’t think anyone disagrees with that in a philosophical/moral sense.

The problem is that it is endless in its supply. There should be a maximum number of years that a person should receive such benefits.

Love to see proposed tax rate for a house.