Should income tax be scraped in place for a Federal sales tax?

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by Slowpoke_TX

Believing that the neighbor has a moral obligation to share his water is altogether different than believing that government should have the authority to take his water from him.

I agree. But my central question is this: If you were to literally find yourself in a situation where someone was about to die unless you played Robin Hood with someone else's property, would you let the person die? Or would you play the Robin Hood role?

Now, of course, if you would choose to play Robin Hood in this personal situation, it still does not necessarily follow that society, via government, should play Robin Hood and impose progressive income taxes, but I think that getting clear about what we think is justified on this face-to-face personal level is a good step toward figuring out what the basic principles should be when we look at the role of government.

If you would choose to let the person die, then it would be easy for you to be consistent in you opposition to progressive taxes.

If you would choose to play Robin Hood in a real-life personal crisis, then we have to think a bit more deeply to figure out our reasons for saying that society should not play Robin Hood if lives can be saved in doing so.

I tend to lean toward the liberal side, but I seriously don't know the best arguments for or against the Robin Hood concept (on either an individual or social level), so I'm hoping that some of you folks can help me think it through.

[Slowpoke_TX]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

I agree. But my central question is this: If you were to literally find yourself in a situation where someone was about to die unless you played Robin Hood with someone else's property, would you let the person die? Or would you play the Robin Hood role?

1. I am not the govt.
2. The vast majority of the money govt confiscates from us is not used to prevent the imminent loss of human life.
Please come up with an apples-to-apples comparison.

Originally Posted by gaylenwoof

If you would choose to let the person die, then it would be easy for you to be consistent in you opposition to progressive taxes.

Do you really believe our overall tax system is progressive? Only the income tax is progressive, the overall system is very regressive.

Originally Posted by gaylenwoof

I tend to lean toward the liberal side, but I seriously don't know the best arguments for or against the Robin Hood concept (on either an individual or social level), so I'm hoping that some of you folks can help me think it through.

Do you believe that the money you earn, and the things you purchase with it, belong to you?

[MEDALLOKUYA]

Originally Posted by Unsettomati

OK - stop and think about what you're proposing.

In 2014, federal revenues were slightly more that $3 trillion. We have 320 million people in this country.

The leaves us with a per capita bill of $9400. So, what's your plan for those under 18? I'm guessing you realize that minors simply are not going to be able to pay. What are you going to do? Present them with a bill - plus interest, of course, just to keep up with the rate of inflation - when they turn 18?

See, this is the problem with your proposal - it is completely unworkable. People graduating from high school with debts approaching $200k?

OK, so maybe you're willing to let it go for minors. But since 23% of our country are minors, the per capita tax for everyone else has just topped $12k. But what about college students? How can they possibly afford college, and living expenses, and all that tax? They can't - congratulations, you've just completely rendered unfunctional our secondary education system in this country for all but those with wealthy parents.

And how about the homeless? The elderly poor? Those living in poverty who simply do not have the means to pay that $12k? The per capita tax just keeps going higher and higher. Unless you want to confiscate what little they have, which will completely terminate their ability to contribute at all - which just exacerbates the problem.

Are you even aware that your proposal would be economically toxic, ultimately resulting in less money to be taxed in the first place, further decreasing revenues in a negative feedback loop?

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Progressive tax codes exist because of the very elementary principle that people barely scraping by do not have the reserves to fund national parks and millions of soldiers, interstate highways and supercarriers, and whatnot. But Tom Brady does. Warren Buffet does. The Koch brothers do. Kanye West does. Graduated tax rates that hit non-essential earnings the hardest inflict the least economic burden on the economy, thereby hindering it as little as possible while still funding the machinery of state.

Tax codes are not a fantasy or an exercise in equality. They actually have to function and produce the wages of soldiers and the steel to build schools and bridges and tanks, and so on and so on.

This is how it works, at least outside the pages of an Ayn Rand novel.

Excellent post. I use to think everyone should be taxed the same. However, after thinking about it, it is just not logical. There is no way to please everyone, thus you must go with what ever is in the best interest of the country and it's people. Thus a progressive tax is absolutely the best option.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by Slowpoke_TX

Do you really believe our overall tax system is progressive? Only the income tax is progressive, the overall system is very regressive.

I can't see where I said anything to suggest that. I agree that the overall system is mostly regressive.

Do you believe that the money you earn, and the things you purchase with it, belong to you?

Yes, they belong to me. But there are many questions (for me, at least). Is the ownership of private property a right? If it is a legal right? A moral right? Or both?

Assuming that the ownership of private property is a right, how does it compare, in terms of priority, to other rights? Is private ownership an absolute/inalienable right? Or, given a conflict of rights, is it one that might have lower priority that some others?

Related questions: I presume your would agree that we have a legal and moral right to live. This seems like an extremely high-priority right. And yet, historically, the government has claimed the right to kill you. The government has also claimed the right to send you onto battlefields where you are at great risk of death. At times, the American government has seen fit to threaten you with imprisonment if you are unwilling to "die for your country". And so on.

It seems to me that the right to own private property is a lower priority right that the right to life, but most people (including many conservatives) don't think twice about the government's right to kill you or send you to war, so I'm unclear as to what principle makes the ownership of private property a sort of sacred right.

Of course the person who is executed has lost the right to life because they have committed a crime, whereas the average taxpayer is a law-abiding citizen, so this could give us a good principle to work with. Unfortunately the process of getting drafted and being sent to war still leaves us in the lurch because the men being drafted are law-abiding citizens too.

And then there is a question about what it is to earn money, as distinguished from the broader concept of simply acquiring money. We know that it is possible to acquire money that you have not earned. I think in some earlier post I suggested that there might be some practical limit to the concept of earning vs. acquiring. Does the average billionaire actually engage in any behavior on an average day by which he earns a thousand times more than the average millionaire?

In any case, even assuming that the billionaire's money is honestly and unquestionably earned, I'm still not sure that he has a moral right to keep such incredible quantities of it - or that he should have any absolute legal right to do so. I know you don't like my example of the face-to-face choice of letting someone die, but I still think that this type of situation highlights some of the underlying principles. If a person has the moral right to play Robin Hood in order to save the life of someone he cares about, why shouldn't a bunch of people (aka "society") have the right to play Robin Hood (aka "redistribute wealth" via progressive taxation) for the benefit of poor people who might (at least some of them, in some circumstances) literally die without some sort of assistance? I'm looking for the best guiding principles here.

To you this might all seem crystal clear, but from my perspective there are a lot of complicate grey areas with a lot of subtle and potentially conflicting principles to consider. It is not obvious to me that progressive taxation is bad.

[thatguydownsouth]

There is no fair way to tax, at all. No matter what system of taxation you devise, somebody will be unfairly affected. Now the one tax system I am COMPLETELY against is property tax because the government has the ability to confiscate your property if you dont pay the tax, the tax which you are forced to pay because you own said property. Id like to see the stats on how many of the lower class are adversely affected by this rather than income tax.