Letters to the Editor

This letter is associated with the following article:
His loopy tax plan would be an economic disaster -- but it's more honest than the schemes being peddled by the establishment Republican candidates.
  • Yes, but

    The point you don't make is that this so-called "fair tax" is not a tax on income; it is a tax on out go. People who make a lot of money don't spend anywhere near the percentage of their income that people who don't make that much money spend. Thus the tax burden will fall most heavily on the the income groups that spend the greatest percentage of their incomes - i.e. the working poor. I would think any idiot would know that any sales tax is regressive.

    As a side note, I'd like to point out that the current so-called "progressive" tax is progressive only in the sense that the percentage of your income taken by the government for services that you're not likely to use increases with your income. There's no conceptual underpinning for this system other than it's easier to screw a small number of people than a large number of people plus, of course, they actually have money.

    Finally, I'd like to point out that focusing on taxes is stupid. Taxes pay for government spending. You can't reduce (in the long term) taxes if you don't reduce the government spending that drives the need for the taxes - such as stupid wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Drugs, etc), military spending that is more than what the entire rest of the world spends, entitlement programs that are better left to the states, etc etc.