Super, I think I was pretty unequivocal above. I could dial up some stridency & ad hominem to fit in better here
I dont' wish to offend any members of "The Service" as my tax prof used to call it, but the fact is that our economy is saddled by a couple hundred billion dollars of what is referred to as "compliance complexity," from professional fees payable to interpret revenue rulings and the many thousands of pages of The Code (which, by the way, are ALL modifications and exemptions to the fundamental principle of income tax, which is, that every transaction is taxable). The trouble is that any time you try to propose a flat percentage tax on income, everybody has to modify the proposal to suit their particular special interest. Enough modifications and guess what, we're back at the IRC as it stands today. 10% flat tax on income means no itemized deductions, credits, adjustments or otherwise. Income from all sources, broadly defined, all fed in to the top line of a postcard, divide by ten and that's your tax.
Do you know what I would REALLY love to see? A national VAT, a sales tax on all goods and services provided in the economy, at about 17%, coupled with the elimination of the personal income tax. You consume, you pay tax. You save, you invest, you don't. Critics cry foul because it's "regressive" insofar as that 17% represents an unreasonably large chunk of the income of low income persons. What they really mean is that flat taxes eliminate the concept of "fairness," which is to punish with increasing severity the generation of wealth. Why do you think that is? Is it a religious/theological aversion? Guilt? Envy? Fear of individuals accumulating too much power?
No less a personality than V.I. Lenin proposed that imperialism would inevitably result from the need for capital to generate increasingly higher returns. Lenin didn't come up with that idea himself: he borrowed it from Schumpeter, Hilferding, Luxembourg and others, but for an old dead guy he's right: Capital, like electricity, follows the path of least resistance. Do you think it's possible to reverse the export of capital from the United States by reforming the tax climate? Could we lighten the burden on the corporate taxpayer sufficiently to the point where the return on capital was equivalent to the return with outsourced manufacturing and services?
I'm getting off the point here and into the other thread about the perils of outsourcing and protectionism, but the one thing I dont' see anyone in the Bush administration, or the loyal oppostion for that matter, articulating, is that legislation and collective bargaining DON'T work to reverse capital flight. The only thing that guides capitalists are market forces, and if you want to steer commercial activity back home, you have to use market forces to do it.
Wanna hear my theory about the impact of socialized medicine on our civil liberties? It's based on the implied consent doctrine. . .