Originally Posted by Tobra
That is not the only reason, when you have a dozen paying in to support one, it is a little better setup than when you have 2-3 paying for each beneficiary
This is a cyclical thing. It's like a person who only works in the winter, they don't starve to death in the summer because they are smart enough to realize that their income is cylical and they need to save money during the peaks so they can spend it during the troughs.
The baby boomers will not live forever, social security will go back to having "too much money" again in a couple decades.
Originally Posted by Tobra
Preventing a flat tax from adversly affecting the lower end is a simple matter of exempting the first $15K or so from taxes
How are you going to exempt money from a sales tax? Coordinate every business in the country with the new national ID card so that when you run over your $15K it magically starts charging?
Originally Posted by Tobra
With respect to a national sales tax, even if you refund foreign people's money when they leave the country, it would still be a method to get cash out of the leeching illegals.
You seem really itching to get your money's worth out of these illegals but frankly it's not a big priority.
1) There isn't much tax revenue being lost to illegals.
2) If you exempt the first $XX thousand dollars of income, you're probably going to exempt 90+% of illegals.
Originally Posted by Tobra
Folks on the border would maybe run across to buy stuff to avoid this tax, but this is already happening, I guess you have never been to a border town near Mexico.
But there's a difference. When that person runs across the border to buy stuff, they have already paid their taxes on that money. The state is losing out of its sales tax, but all the payroll and income taxes are already accounted for. Under a federal sales tax system this money would be completely lost to the US.
Oh, and lets talk about immigrants for a moment.
Legal immigrants. Do you know how much money is sent Western Union to Latin America and Asia from the US these days? Say bye bye to all that tax money, because they sure as hell aren't spending it here.
Originally Posted by Tobra
You may have noticed that lots of businesses have computers. Tracking sales, internet or otherwise would not be thenightmare you perceive it to be.
The accounting applications used by most large businesses were written before I was out of grade school. I don't think you realize just how bad things are.