goosebumps;1159842 wrote:I'm all for the fair tax. Allows us to tax lots of money that we couldn't touch before. Tourists from other countries, illegal immigrants, drug money, etc.
Don't get me started on Fairtax, haha. It's basically the same system repackaged in a shiny new wrapper. It's only "redeeming" quality, if that can ever be said for higher taxes, is that some sort of federal consumption tax is inevitable.
The feds have been dinking around with capital gains and marginal rates since the beginning, and they pretty consistently only get @18% of GDP. There's not this mountain of untapped tax revenues laying out there that Washington is trying to sell us. The people you are trying to soak spend and invest globally, and that's a loophole you can never close. The whole thing is just a dog chasing it's tale. If the govt wants more revenue, you have to change the whole fundamental tax structure, and pretty much the only opportunity left is a VAT or some form of sales tax.
And the cute trick a VAT pulls is since you are now taxing consumption, you create a massive deferred revenue asset on the govt balance sheet that represents taxing a second time savings that were already taxed when earned as income.
