Originally posted by glbisthewaytobe
Do you want to know what I think we should actually do?
Start by getting rid of individual state income taxes, cut every federal tax bracket in half(only personal income) and institute a sales tax on everything except grocered food items, clothing, water, and electricity. Then raise the federal minimum wage to $10/hour (which is what most of America can agree on as acceptable). Then, tie wages to payroll tax credits. So if you only pay minimum wage you pay the full amount of payroll tax, pay all your american employees more than minimum wage and see that payroll tax disappear. Then tie employee benefits to income tax. Give your american employees no benefits (paid vacation, sick leave, etc) pay the full income tax for your bracket. Have a lot of benefits you hand out to your american employees and see the income tax disappear. Then you marginally increase import taxes to the point where it evens out the cost of goods foreign or domestic.
We should tax people at the point of action. Not before they can be active in society. More people will be less burdened by a drastic cut in income taxes and be able to purchase more, and we will make more money through taxing every sale action that happens. That's why states that have marginal income taxes that are tempered with a sales tax run more smoothly and have more active state economies more often than not. It's only in places like California where they have both high income and sales taxes where it doesn't work.
I like the tax idea personally because I don't consume many products. That being said, any idea what your budget would look like in terms of revenue ?
You realize that import taxes and tariffs can hurt you as much as they help you right ? If you look at oil and fuel alone, we are not that far removed from $100 a barrel, the only reason we are currently at a fraction of that is because of our ability to drill our own oil, if we aggressively added a tariff to foreign oil to support the Texas, ND, OK, Alaska regions, we would likely still be $70+ for oil and $3.50+ for a gallon of gas. I maybe see the dark side of these trade deals more then the average person, we just recently approved a trade deal with Columbia that removed an 80% tax on US beef and TPP will ratchet down what is currently a 39.5% tariff on US beef that Japan has in place and that is one of our largest export markets. The importance of those trade deals being that as the middle class grows worldwide, they consume energy and their diets change and we are one of the largest suppliers of protein and refined fuel and you want to fuck that up now ? That is shitty timing, we already weathered the loss of production jobs and now when it is our turn to reap the rewards from those sacrifices and investments, you want to fuck the whole thing up ? As much as it might pain me and others to admit, we are WTO's bitch. The American consumer supported Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) where US companies were allowed to label a beef product as born, raised, butchered in the USA and Mexico and Canada sued the US with WTO and WTO ruled in their favor to allow them to impose tariff increases which would have cost the US beef industry over 1 billion dollars a year. The US congress caved in immediately, they had no choice. Basically, Canada and Mexico have more control over your food then you do.
