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Now, I know you guys are against taxes and all, but how exactly do you expect to fund any government work? Private donations?

People will band together and use their private resources for the common good. As they do currently in stateless places like Somalia. Republicans: Live the Somalian Dream.

The usual dream here is to go back to a set-up like in the 1800s and turn of the century 1900s where the government was funded with tariffs, tolls, licenses and other revenue streams. Of course, this also requires a much more limited government -- you're not going to fund the Food & Drug Administration and Health & Human Services with port tariffs. But the dream of such thinkers is a "starve the beast" mentality where you cut off the revenue streams to the government and watch it shrink to a size you feel it should be at. Eliminating the IRS (and thus income taxes) is an extreme example of this ideology versus simply lowering taxes.

Heh, okay that's worth a chuckle. Eliminating things cold turkey worked so well in the 1920s, though.

Edited, Mar 24th 2015 9:29am by lolgaxe

Didn't you try that once already?

I'm avowing ignorance here. Isn't the point of Federal taxes, in any country, is to provide money for things and services for the people, e.g., libraries, parks, roads, schools, etc.? Your solution seems to create more loopholes for tax invasion by simply removing traces of purchases. I realize that there is no perfect solution, but I fail to see how this solution would be worth implementing.

That was what I was thinking. It makes no sense to propose to solely tax off sales. So, I was correct.. insane..

Maybe we should tax jobs. That should encourage efficiency in the workplace.

So, I just realized that Ted Cruz not only wants to abolish the IRS, but create a flat tax for everyone where they could file their taxes on a post card. Who exactly would you be filing your taxes to if you don't have the IRS or an IRS like figure?

So, he doesn't actually mean abolish the IRS, but change the processes.

That would essentially be doing what the IRS would be responsible for. I understand what you are saying, but that is very misleading. The concept of an IRS still exists and that isn't being conveyed. We shouldn't have to dive this deep into conversation to determine what he means if he is running for president. Especially if it is something that bold.

I'm not saying I agree with him, I'm just saying I understand what he's getting at, regardless of how misguided it is.

My taxes are easy. I'm single, no dependents, with almost nothing in terms of deductions (no mortgage, loans, etc). No itemization for me. Standard deduction and done.

You don't have both. A federal sales tax or even a flat tax push the tax burden off the wealthy and onto the middle and lower class.

Sales tax: As stated, the wealthy tend to save/invest their money whereas the middle and lower class tend to spend it (usually out of necessity) and there's a lot more lower/middle class people than 1%ers. You'll notice that Walmart makes a lot more per year than Saks 5th Avenue. So if we're finacing the country off a federal sales tax, where do you think most of that sales tax revenue comes from? What the proponents want you to think is "well, a yacht costs more than my Big Lots bookshelf so I guess the rich will be paying more" but that only works on an individual-to-individual comparison. When there's a million bookshelves for every yacht, it becomes clear who is shouldering the load (more so when you can finesse the yacht's sale to happen in Antigua; harder to do for a cheap bookshelf).

Flat Tax: Much the same. We currently have a progressive tax system -- the more you make, the more that tier of money is taxed. Everyone pays the same tax per tier, it's just that only the wealthy reach the higher tiers and pay the higher rates on them. But if you flatten that to one rate, what happens? The rate on the lower tiers that everyone is paying goes up and the rate on the upper tiers that only the wealthy is paying goes down. So the amount you pay on the first $50,000* increases so the tax someone else pays on the $500,000-$1,000,000* bracket can go down. It has to be this way unless you're just going to lower every rate to the lowest amount and massively decrease the amount of revenue brought in.

* Brackets for illustration purposes only because I'm too lazy to look up an actual bracket chart.

Now, neither of these proposals should actually appeal to anyone with a modicum of sense who isn't wealthy. Or, hey, maybe your convictions are such that you'll happily pay more taxes so some rich guy can pay less. That's fair. But the proponents know that those people are few and far between and "Pay more taxes so the rich can pay less" isn't an election winner. So you just sort of ignore that part and dress is up in "but paying taxes is so hard and this would make it like a post card!" and "the IRS is going to come after you if you contribute to conservative groups so we have to kill it!" and other reasons that rely on emotional rhetoric rather than financial sense. On the other hand, the wealthy know exactly what these proposals means so they're happy to write the campaign checks to Cruz while the lower class writes him checks because it means getting rid of the scary IRS monster.

Edited, Mar 29th 2015 9:01pm by Jophiel