(09-29-2020, 09:46 PM)flsprtsgod Wrote:

(09-29-2020, 06:37 PM)mikesez Wrote: You will never mature as a citizen as long as you keep calling taxes penalties.
A penalty is something the government charges you with for your specific situation because you specifically did something wrong, like when I made a mistake on my taxes.
But when everyone who earns a certain amount of money or spends a certain amount of money has to pay the same thing, that's not a penalty anymore. That's just a tax.
Anyhow, you're right that taxing sales makes the base broader and ropes in people who don't pay federal taxes today.
But there's another group of people, that does file federal taxes, but has a very low wage. They might be paying less than 10% of their income in federal taxes now. It would be nice to tell them they can pay zero income tax, but if you turn around and make them pay a 25% or 30% federal sales tax, obviously that's not a good deal for them.

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The check said pay to the order of United States Treasury. 
I can't imagine a bank would cash such a check without proper identification. Plus the letter had really specific information about what numbers were on what line of my 1040.
If that was all from a fraudster, I tell you it was the ballsiest fraudster I ever heard of.

The Fair Tax proposal is designed to "prebate" the tax on poverty level spending with a monthly check for all households. That way the lowest income households pay no tax on most or all of their monthly expenditures.

We would still be filling out long forms with all sorts of details about how much money we make, how we make it, and how our household is structured, so the government could determine how much "prebate" we get. Frankly I don't see the advantage.
While Bush was president, he commissioned a study of this issue. He found that if the prebate was small, the tax burden shifted very heavily to the poorest people. As they made the pre-bate bigger, the burden shifted away from the poorest people and towards the middle class. Either way, the tax burden on the rich was much less. 
Which is similar to how it would be with a flatter income tax

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