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DON'T TL;DR THIS IT'S IMPORTANT FOCUS FOR ONCE!!
14 years ago
Look I know most of you are here to fap but damnit some of you HAVE to open your eyes and for ONCE take a look at what's happening in our country. I know many of you don't like long paragraphs so let me break this up into bullet points to stew over.
We have a man in office right now who believes that the United States is no better a country than any other, and while we fall short of some countries, I firmly believe that this is one great place to live!
Our President is not qualified to run the office he's in, ignoring the debate about his birth, he was still not RAISED in this country properly. At best he was raised in Hawaii for some part where they teach "Hawaiian History" not so much of "American History". He's never had to worry about a paycheck and throughout his life he's been surrounded by Socialists and hates the free market.
Him and his buddies pushed through a DISASTER of a health care bill. Yes Health Care needed reform BUT NOT THAT! To people who think that it was actually there to help you pull your head out of the ground and pay attention. Any taxpayer with business income who spends over $600 in one year with one business will have to report those expenditures to the IRS. That is a LOT of paperwork. And guess what, if they do it wrong they get heavy penalties. This isn't the big bad corporations, this is anybody making business income of over $600 in a single year.
There are all kinds of hidden goodies for the government in that nightmare.
Here's where I have my own solution. Go into Google, Youtube, whatever, and look up Herman Cain. YES he's a republican, NO I don't like republicans but you have to get past your happy little bubble of party familiarity and look at what really matters, the person. We're all fed up with politicians lying to us. How about a citizen? Somebody who doesn't bother with political correctness or sugarcoating the matter, getting things that need done, done.
MOST IMPORTANT!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR PAYCHECK AND FINANCIAL FUTURE PAY ATTENTION TO THIS!!!
Herman Cain is a HUUUUGE supporter of the FairTax. And to all of those people who don't know or have been lied to let me clear this up a bit. I'm pulling this information from, and I know I'll catch flak for this, Neal Boortz' website. Yes he's an asshole and some people think he's biased but I'm pulling from there for two simple reasons, 1, He's got the facts, ALL of which you can look up yourself in the bill itself to see he's not lying. And 2, he can explain it clearer than I could. Here are two of the main questions opponents preach about the FairTax:
Question: “The FairTax will add a 23% sales tax to the price of everything we buy!”
Answer: “One glaring fault of the FairTax is that it is easy to demagogue, especially if opponents are willing to lie. The FairTax is not an additional tax, it is a replacement tax. The FairTax replaces the embedded tax – averaging 22% -- that exists in every consumer product and service we buy. The embedded taxes will disappear when personal and corporate income taxes are repealed along with excise taxes and will be replaced by the FairTax. So the correct language is the FairTax will replace the embedded taxes that are already included in the price of all consumer goods. If someone uses the words “add to” instead of “replace” they’re either lying or profoundly ignorant.
Question: “There are charges that the FairTax would benefit the rich while actually raising taxes on the middle class. Are they right?”
Answer: “Well certainly you’re going to have a wealth-envy argument from FairTax opponents. Just following the liberal script. But let’s look at the middle class. Many in the middle class have no federal income tax liability at all right now, but they still may pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Under the FairTax those taxes disappear. In addition, every single household – including every single middle class household – will receive a credit to either a checking account, credit card or debit card every single month to cover the FairTax they’ll pay that month as they purchase the basic necessities of life. I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how eliminating all payroll taxes and basically refunding, in advance, the FairTax payable on life’s basic necessities constitutes a tax increase on the middle class.”
tl;dr - For fucks sake this should be important to you! If anything AT LEAST read the little bit of information I've put up about the FairTax!! It's the best tax reform anybody could ever come up with!
We have a man in office right now who believes that the United States is no better a country than any other, and while we fall short of some countries, I firmly believe that this is one great place to live!
Our President is not qualified to run the office he's in, ignoring the debate about his birth, he was still not RAISED in this country properly. At best he was raised in Hawaii for some part where they teach "Hawaiian History" not so much of "American History". He's never had to worry about a paycheck and throughout his life he's been surrounded by Socialists and hates the free market.
Him and his buddies pushed through a DISASTER of a health care bill. Yes Health Care needed reform BUT NOT THAT! To people who think that it was actually there to help you pull your head out of the ground and pay attention. Any taxpayer with business income who spends over $600 in one year with one business will have to report those expenditures to the IRS. That is a LOT of paperwork. And guess what, if they do it wrong they get heavy penalties. This isn't the big bad corporations, this is anybody making business income of over $600 in a single year.
There are all kinds of hidden goodies for the government in that nightmare.
Here's where I have my own solution. Go into Google, Youtube, whatever, and look up Herman Cain. YES he's a republican, NO I don't like republicans but you have to get past your happy little bubble of party familiarity and look at what really matters, the person. We're all fed up with politicians lying to us. How about a citizen? Somebody who doesn't bother with political correctness or sugarcoating the matter, getting things that need done, done.
MOST IMPORTANT!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR PAYCHECK AND FINANCIAL FUTURE PAY ATTENTION TO THIS!!!
Herman Cain is a HUUUUGE supporter of the FairTax. And to all of those people who don't know or have been lied to let me clear this up a bit. I'm pulling this information from, and I know I'll catch flak for this, Neal Boortz' website. Yes he's an asshole and some people think he's biased but I'm pulling from there for two simple reasons, 1, He's got the facts, ALL of which you can look up yourself in the bill itself to see he's not lying. And 2, he can explain it clearer than I could. Here are two of the main questions opponents preach about the FairTax:
Question: “The FairTax will add a 23% sales tax to the price of everything we buy!”
Answer: “One glaring fault of the FairTax is that it is easy to demagogue, especially if opponents are willing to lie. The FairTax is not an additional tax, it is a replacement tax. The FairTax replaces the embedded tax – averaging 22% -- that exists in every consumer product and service we buy. The embedded taxes will disappear when personal and corporate income taxes are repealed along with excise taxes and will be replaced by the FairTax. So the correct language is the FairTax will replace the embedded taxes that are already included in the price of all consumer goods. If someone uses the words “add to” instead of “replace” they’re either lying or profoundly ignorant.
Question: “There are charges that the FairTax would benefit the rich while actually raising taxes on the middle class. Are they right?”
Answer: “Well certainly you’re going to have a wealth-envy argument from FairTax opponents. Just following the liberal script. But let’s look at the middle class. Many in the middle class have no federal income tax liability at all right now, but they still may pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Under the FairTax those taxes disappear. In addition, every single household – including every single middle class household – will receive a credit to either a checking account, credit card or debit card every single month to cover the FairTax they’ll pay that month as they purchase the basic necessities of life. I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how eliminating all payroll taxes and basically refunding, in advance, the FairTax payable on life’s basic necessities constitutes a tax increase on the middle class.”
tl;dr - For fucks sake this should be important to you! If anything AT LEAST read the little bit of information I've put up about the FairTax!! It's the best tax reform anybody could ever come up with!
It sounds much better.
Then even the government is happy because almost 100% of the people living in this country, that's citizens, the rich, the poor, illegal immigrants, prostitutes and pimps, drug dealers, even visitors to our country, everybody who once avoided taxed are now suddenly contributing towards our Federal Government just by buying the stuff they would have bought anyway.
And now the business that once went overseas to avoid our governments tax burden say "Holy SH!T! Look how easy the tax system is there now! And we can get American workers who despite reputation actually do a damn good job! Come on guys! Last one there pays the corporate tax! Hah! Kidding! There are none!"
Now snap back to reality, see your paycheck, chewed up and spit out by the tax system, and think "If only once I could get that number on the top..."
Lets do something about it.
Like I said, if i have reason to think he can do it and I don't morally object to the rest of his platform, I'm not biased with regard to party. I always did hate seeing that money vanish; particularly since now I'm psychologically disabled and I can't even get what I paid into the system back from it now that I need it and have for the last several years -_-;;
But please, do some research on the FairTax at FairTax.org , once you learn about it, you, like everybody who's learned about it, will ask my God why hasn't this been done yet? And it's because the politicians know it would be the greatest shift in power from government to voters ever.
The education system is indeed in shambles and needs reworking. The Board of Education is a nightmare. I don't know what to do about that, it's not my place of research. My concern is on whose calling the shots and how to fix our antiquated tax code. Of the potential GOP candidates I've seen, Herman Cain makes the most sense to me. Piss on all of these politicians, lets get somebody who can take the reigns and get out country back on track.
The ONLY thing I could commend him on is giving the order to take out Osama Bin Laden. And even then all he did was say okay. In the beginning his kind were against even being there. And also it was Clinton and Bush who were in office at the time that the information leading to him was obtained via methods of "advanced interrogation", a.k.a waterboarding and such, which the Liberals were opposed to, and yet here comes Obama singing as if he orchestrated it all.
Obama is an unqualified hack and in my opinion a traitor to this country and it's Constitution
And I totally agree on changing the people, people need to wake up, become aware, become self-reliant and not beg for handouts. If everybody in this country was informed on what was going on, then politicians be damned, they'd have no choice but to tell the truth and do what's right, because they'd be called out on it at every turn.
I'm not sure if any of this can be passed, but if we get the opportunity, we need to enact a tax that's fair and can't be easily inflated. A flat tax might be the only way to do that. *shrugs* But I leave the details to those more knowledgeable than me.
Still, Cigar Skunk would know better than me. I don't do any research; I just repeat what I hear or have been told. He's pretty sharp. Why don't you go poke him sometime?
The problem is that it genuinely would shift tax burden from the rich to the poor, as measured by the standard of disposable income - income expenditure that doesn't go straight into things that are critical for survival (basic food, shelter, water, medicine...)
It's an overly simplistic solution to a complicated problem. I'm a bit concerned that you're so enthusiastic about supporting it without apparently having asked why America and other first-world countries have instituted progressive taxation to begin with.
The idea that it shifts the tax burden from rich to the poor is, no offense, ABSOLUTELY ABSURD. It doesn't shift anything, it only causes, by way of buying new goods and services, EVERYBODY for once to pay taxes. Only once the embedded taxes are removed and the markets adjust, you'll hardly notice a difference.. If you don't hardly notice a difference, and suddenly you have more money on your paycheck, as well as a prebate each month, how can you call that putting a burden on ANYBODY?
The prebate itself works like this. The economists who made the FairTax believed that you should be able to take care of your family before paying a cent to the government. So they added in the prebate, which says that all households get a check at the beginning of each month to cover what is deemed the amount of FairTax you'd pay on the basics needed for life, which would be loaded onto a card possibly. To prevent fraud they would most likely have you file a simple piece of paperwork that lets them know who and how many people live in the household. Explain to me, if you can, how that puts any kind of a burden on the poor.
Our current tax system is a nightmare, available for those with power to twist how they see fit to benefit themselves. The FairTax is the opposite. It's transparent. Sure they could still raise it from the initial 23% after it's put in, but not as secretly as they do our current taxes. Why? Because on every purchase you'd make, anywhere you get a receipt it will say (as an example for a $100 item) Item: $77 and then right after that FairTax: $23.
Get the money you rightfully earned on your paycheck. Monthly prebate for EVERYBODY(this is called the FAIRTax after all, get over wealth envy). April 12th becomes just another spring day. Businesses flood back into our country for having the easiest tax system known in the world. Does it sound too good to be true? Of course it sounds it. But it is true, and it's not hidden in hundreds and hundreds of complicated tax code. But in a modest 165 page bill.
Now, you're saying that there'd be effectively no increase in my paid taxes on goods, yet I'd get more money back on my work paychecks. That's very interesting - and leads me to a very significant question. If I pay the same amount of taxes on every purchase as I do now, but no longer am handing in a payroll tax, an income tax, or other forms of taxation - this means I'm paying fewer dollars in taxes, total. I'd only be paying the same amount if the difference in the consumption tax was equal to the amount that I would have been paying through non-sales-tax forms of taxation.
The second interpretation of your statement I can see is that you're suggesting that I'm paying for corporate taxes indirectly due to markups in the price created by those corporations when they price their products. In this case, you would be shifting tax burden from corporations to consumers and trusting the free market to push prices down after the elimination of said tax. I'm not sure I completely agree with the premise that all products are marked up for corporate tax - indeed, there are some rather notorious loopholes in the system that have lead to some corporations paying much less than they should in theory. Their products, in principle, would not be marked up currently - but would be affected by FairTax and become more expensive after the passing of the bill, in which case the 'Notice no difference in prices' promise no longer stands.
As for the prebate, it's an interesting idea, but an important question to ask here is what the money values are. It was estimated that a consumption-based tax would be non-progressive (and probably regressive if viewed through the lens of disposable income) without this prebate, but according to the aforementioned report by the APFTR, it would take a $600 billion entitlement program to make such a tax 'appropriately progressive' (P. 222; Conclusion).
If the prebate values are low, it may not be sufficient to prevent tax burden from ultimately falling more on the lower classes than previously.
If the prebate values are high, it would create an entitlement program larger than Medicare.
Essentially, my big two questions are these:
-Is the prebate's value sufficiently large to make this a truly progressive tax? If it is, are we okay with creating the largest entitlement program in Federal history to make it happen?
-Does this reduce overall tax rates, and thereby reduce revenue?
Naturally, High income earners spend more with taxes then low income, especially if the lower income earners buy mostly used products. Don't forget, the FairTax applies to NEW goods and services because the tax should only be paid once. The tax burden is still on high-income earners, but they pay the same amount per purchase as anybody else.
To your second point, no there are no provisions in the FairTax that would force companies to lower their prices after initiation of the FairTax. It's easy to imagine how they'd just keep the extra money. But only companies with no sense of business would do so. It's been seen before when an airline tax was never extended. The airlines kept the rates the same right away. Almost. One airline said hey if I lower the rate I'll get more market share and within' hours the rates had fallen back into place, it's just competitive business. I said you'd hardly notice a difference. Naturally with some products here and there there would be changes but nothing dramatic.
I would love to see that report you mention, btw, and see what I could get from it.
Two your two big questions:
The prebate can in a sense be looked at as a tax return each month, minus all the complication of our current system. Let me quote this from FairTax.org, "The size of the prebate is determined by the Department of Health & Human Services’ poverty level guideline multiplied by the tax rate. This is a well-accepted, long-used poverty-level calculation that includes food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, etc." That's how it's determined who gets how much.
As for how much revenue is generated by the FairTax and the idea of a reduction in revenue it wouldn't be so. When you look at the numbers, people who currently earn a wage, not even including those on unemployment, but just those who for various reasons do not currently pay income taxes, 51% of current people earning a normal wage do not pay income taxes. Now if the need for paying income taxes was removed and was instead collected through products that everybody buys, legal citizens, illegal citizens, foreigners, everybody would be paying towards the federal government. Currently the top 1% of income earners, $350,000 or more a year, handle about 40% of the tax burden. They would continue to buy and expand business, suddenly made much easier by the FairTax, but now almost everybody else in the country is supporting the system. It can only increase revenue.
I would like to forward you to this page, it may be able to answer more questions and they can probably explain things better than I can =) http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageSer.....name=about_faq
The arguments about Obama are as stupid as they are numerous. He is and has been President. His term is almost over, why are we still reviewing his birth records and qualifications? Even if he is no more qualified to be Commander in Chief than to run a McDonalds drive-thru window, he's already done it, so the point is moot. How can you question the qualifications of a former Governor (etc) and then laud a man whose selling point is that he has no governmental qualifications? (And whose bulk of expertise is in the FOOD industry)
GET OVER THAT SUPREMIST MENTALITY!!! America, as a whole, is no better than any other country. Fact. Fact. Fact. (OH MUH GAWD! NOW IM GOIN TO HELL FOR BASHING GODS CHOSEN LAND!!!) Often it is worse, but you're young and you were raised American, so youve got that clouding your thoughts. Americans are told from birth theyre the best, and its not your fault you believe it.
You scorn 'Hawaiian' history the same way the rest of the world scorns American-centric world history. From what I know of our "Great" country, he was better off being educated elsewhere. Pick twenty, hell, a HUNDRED, random people off the street and ask them to name FIVE US presidents, excluding Nixon, JFK, Clinton, Bush and Obama (the obvious ones). Or senators. Or amendments. Or to recite more than "Four score and seven years ago" of the Gettysburg address. .... Now ask the same people to name five football players, actors who have portrayed a vampire, wrestlers or items on the BK value menu. If we really were the best, we'd be taking our not inconsiderable resources and doing something more useful with them (like, maybe the homelessness problem, or the deficit) than bombing everyone to challenges our au-thor-i-tay.
The reason stupid people run the country and get away with things is because there is no shortage of stupid people to vote them into office. Your stupid candidate is not better than my stupid candidate, because in the end, theyre all just vying for the same 3million a year figurehead job. And the issues? Those are dealt with (or more often, ignored entirely) by congress, (Think: President/Congress as British Royalty/Parliament) and important issues to people like you and me mean nothing to them compared with the vast amount of wealth waiting to be made if only we can just figure out a reason to tramp around the wilderness of some little third-world country who has no means to stop us, and no voice to dissuade popular opinion and blind patriotism that supports it.
I probably got off track a couple times, but the main point remains, I think.