♪alt13
Well-Known Member
Hmm, not being a politician I've never thought about it too much, so just spitballing a bit here.
Firstly: It's my understanding that a tax capturing 20-25% of national GDP(16.77 trillion 2015) would pretty much cover any budget(3.69 trillion 2015) our current government could come up with. Is that essentially right? It would be great to get ourselves at least close to balanced.
Longterm I would like to see the US tax system move towards a sales tax based system, obviously it couldn't all be implemented at once, but I do think it could be phased in in place of income tax.
Benefits I see to a sales tax based system:
A) Less bureaucracy - from the IRS and in terms of everyone having to file all that junk every year
B) maybe a bit harder to find loopholes through (big one obviously being buying overseas)
C) seems fairly easy to tax different items different amounts (food vs yachts)
So perhaps a marginalized* sales tax based around 20%(completely based off earlier GDP guess) would be my favored approach? (items like food are left out or taxed lightly, while more luxury items are taxed more heavily)
*marginalized - I think this only really applies to income taxes, but I couldn't think of a better word for what I was describing, does it still make sense?
I'm down but want a more progressive sales tax. Every adult American citizen should get a monthly sales tax rebate check that is equal to twice the sales tax of the single poverty line. The poverty line for 2015 for a single person was $11,670, double that and you get 23,340. let's say the tax was 30%. Every citizen would get a rebate check for $583.50 that would cover the sales tax up to double the poverty line. Anything they spend beyond that would be government revenue.
So if the Sales tax was 30%. For me it would mean that I would get a check for $583.50 as would my wife totaling $1,167. So everything that we spent under $46,680 would be effectively tax free and everything we spent above that would be taxed at 30%.
The only people that would need to file anything would be businesses. Everyone else just has to cash their check and shop like they normally do.