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1) Tax clothing on items above $200. (No reason someone buying a $10,000 dress or $25,000 fur shouldn't pay tax)
2) Continue the tax brackets.. (why exactly do they stop around $400k? Plenty of people make over $800k a year, $1 million, $100million, etc. The tax bracket should continue to rise even slight %s so long as incomes continue to rise)
3)create a tax bracket for capital gains just as you do with income. Why do capital gains tap out at 15%?.. If I'm retired why should I pay 15% on my life long investments, when the son of the billionaire made $40,000,000 in interest alone last year from a safe investment and is also only paying 15%.. create a tax bracket for long term investments withdrawn(10% under $50k, 12% under $100k, 15% under $200k, 20% under $350k, 25% under $600k, etc) Keep this well below income tax rates so there is still a good reason to invest long term.
4) Eliminate the war on drugs.. this is such a waste of money, your creating powerful cartels in Mexico, and as a result we have ton of immigrants flocking to US costing us even more money. We don't need a giant wall, just give the immigrants a reason to stay in Mexico instead of fleeing from it.
5) Inheritance cap - Leave the lucky sperm with more than enough to have a wonderful life. $100,000,000 is enough to earn someone $3 million a year in a safe 3% investment. Its also more than enough to do whatever you want in life. Anything above a $100,000,000 inheritance should simply be taxed at 99%.
Did I hear wrong when I understood Presidential travel to cost what a first-class ticket would cost? For personal travel, not business. I have no issue with business travel being covered. Even if every trip the President and family took was eliminated, it would be such an insignificant amount of money it's hardly worth its own line item.
As for national debt, I can't see it being paid off. I'd just assume work on my own debt and encourage others to do the same. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of anyone else. And if you're drowning in debt, you can't tell anyone else they shouldn't do the same.
The President is always the President. He's never really off the clock and there's no such thing as a purely "Personal" trip. If 9/11 happens while Obama is golfing he's going to have to be able to respond in a matter of minutes.
He's always going to need security and a LOT of it- unless you want another JFK/McKinley/Garfield/Lincoln situation. This isn't cheap and is probably where most of the expense comes from.
He's always going to need to be reachable, even on vacation, likely with access to data, support staff etc.
The national debt isn't like personal debt and the federal govt budget isn't anything like a household budget. There is no need to ever pay off the national debt and attempting to do so would have a negative impact on the economy
It would have a negative impact on economies in a lot of countries that use US Treasuries as the reserve assets underpinning their national economies. When Bill Clinton ran those four consecutive budget surpluses between 1998 and 2001, they began by simply allowing public debt securities to expire at maturity. The Bond Marketing Association had to send reps to Washington to plead for some other mechanism. With no deficits to finance and outstanding issues disappearing, there was a shortage fo product in the market. Treasury agreed to run a series of reverse-auctions so that the people most favorable to surrender of their securities would be the ones actually doing so.
The President is always the President. He's never really off the clock and there's no such thing as a purely "Personal" trip. If 9/11 happens while Obama is golfing he's going to have to be able to respond in a matter of minutes.
Most of the general government expenses that partisans try to hang on Obama are established and often required by laws passed long before the current President ever came to prominence. These laws were amended and expanded after 9/11, but the basics have been there for much longer. All Presidents meanwhile reimburse the government for the costs of their personal expenses. This includes the airfare that an ordinary citizen would have paid for the same trip via commercial airlines. Taxpayers also provide three meals a day for whatever First Family is occupying the White House. But if any President is working late one night and calls down to the kitchen to have a pastrami sandwich sent up, he pays for that out of pocket.
Excellent idea. It would be great for richer folks.
Just like all flat-tax notions. People just don't seem to grasp the notion that by flattening a line that has a positive slope, taxes at the wealthy end will go down while those at the opposite end will go up.
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