what kind of law would you write?

[Walter]

All taxes are legalized theft. Why should the government have the right to tax?

 

[TxHockeyGuy]

All taxes are legalized theft. Why should the government have the right to tax?

I'm no fan of taxes either but can you imagine not having a public road system? There are certain necessary evils. I just think our government goes way too far in trying to protect us from ourselves which ends up costing us way too much.

 

[ams511]

If you're super rich (the Kennedys leap to mind) there's no problem at all transferring your wealth; that's why the tax law is 10,000 pages long instead of two - burried in there are the protections for those folks. Who gets killed is the guy with a couple hundred acres and no cash. The value of the land pushes the family farm into the inheritance tax bracket and the family has to sell to the bubbas (who are protected) to survive. Besides all that, what gives you the right to reach into the pocket of a guy who's made a fortune legally and paid all the taxes on the money already? Why should you be able to steal his money when he dies - or prevent him from just giving it to his family before he dies? "It's just not right to let someone have that much money?" Why not? They earned it - they have a right to do whatever they want to do with it without it being taxed again and again and again.
Which brings to mind another tax that ought to be scrapped - property tax.
Rick

The Kennedy's and Ford's are examples on why the law doesn't work correctly anymore. Though I do not know their current net worth. If you look at the early industrialists like Pulman, Carnegie, or Sloan, their family are not household names anymore, so it did work at one time. I agree with you that the law UNFAIRLY penalizes the man with a couple of hundred acres. It should have been modified over time and the limits expanded. I think the Kennedy's and Ford's used trusts to delay the payment of the tax. However at some point it cannot be delayed and now they look to abolish it. The same as how Disney successfully got the law change so Micky Mouse did not fall into the public domain. As you must realize the problem in democracy is money can buy power, it you limit the money you also limit the power these people have. If not the US would be like Mexico and the Philippines where the country is controlled by a few powerful families who pull the strings behind the scenes.

 

[Rick Murchison]

All taxes are legalized theft. Why should the government have the right to tax?

Why, to "form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" of course. All those things cost money.
Unfortunately today they also meddle in nearly everything else as well.
Taxes need to be slashed not only because the government has far far overstepped its constitutional mandates, but the simple fact that lowering taxes increases revenue proves that we are on the back side of the Laffer curve and that max revenue can be achieved at an even lower tax rate.
Rick

 

[ams511]

All taxes are legalized theft. Why should the government have the right to tax?

Do you have a way to finance public expeditures without a tax?

 

[Al Mialkovsky]

I would pass a law that for every new law, you have to take one off the books.

Think about it....every year we have more and more regulation and less personal

freedom. This is no longer a free country.

.

Amen sister

 

[Al Mialkovsky]

Do you have a way to finance public expeditures without a tax?

There used to be a way. Federal Income tax isn't a 100 years old yet.

 

[Bill51]

If one really understands Adam Smith’s economic philosophy you will see that plans such as Steve Forbes’ Flat Tax is actually much more regressive and less in line with Smith’s objectives than a consumption tax structured like Linder’s Fair Tax. Then there’s the simple fact that Smith died before this nation existed and it was Alexander Hamilton and company that wrote the Constitution and developed the master plan for the USA and it’s their economic plan we’ve lived by – not Smith. Smith did make great distinction between necessary and luxury items, he opposed taxes on production calling them “disincentives to produce” (especially taxes on profits), and he opposed any tax that would “occasion the invasion of privacy” on the grounds they are contradictory to liberty such as income taxes. Then Smith contradicted himself by claiming that taxes should be proportional to the revenue one enjoys under the protection of the state.

In the 1700s and up until Henry Ford upset the prior economic models (which didn’t exist until Smith defined them), an individuals benefit from state protection consisted primarily in the collection of personal wealth so one’s income was indicative of the “drain” one put on the government. With the rise of a consumer economy during the early 1900s, that began changing and today it could easily be argued that government expenditure is more driven by what I consume than what I produce. For example the governmental cost of highways for my big fancy car that I drive 100,000 miles per year is much higher than the governments cost of protecting the money I earn and put in the bank. Since Smith started out studying morality more than economics many of his writings reflected some tendency toward seeing government as a mechanism of wealth redistribution and Marx even used his many of his ideas – while failing miserably at understanding Smith’s concepts of free market.

The Fair Tax and most consumption taxes recognize the differences between necessary and luxury purchases, and they also provide mechanisms to protect the poor completely while making the tax progressive for those above the poverty level with the rate of progressiveness rapidly decreasing when expenditures exceed about 4 times the typical consumption rate of one considered in poverty. In other words by the time you’re spending at the rate of a typical $80K per year person there’s not a lot more progressiveness built into the system so the tax more accurately reflects the individual’s “drain and benefit” on the government rather than it being used as a backdoor way to redistribute wealth (just look at Zimbabwe and South Africa to see how bad an idea that is).

Death taxes are the second worse case of the government double dipping into individuals pockets with no additional benefit being delivered to the individual, with taxes on dividends being the worst offender. Any double taxation is not only counter to productivity but it actually hinders the capital formation needed to maintain overall productivity and both of them stifle new blood from joining the investor/capitalist rank rather than doing anything about those already there.

 

[Bill51]

All taxes are legalized theft. Why should the government have the right to tax?

It took Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin more than a few years to convince Thomas Jefferson of the need for a formal way to raise revenues and it wasn’t until Jefferson accepted the reality that the Articles of Confederation were a failure that he agreed to their ideas which formed the basis for Article I, Sections 7 & 8 of the Constitution – including the later clauses of Section 8 that I personally disagree with since they’re overused for pork spending. The problems started in 1913 with the 16th Amendment which basically made the rights of the Federal government as to how they would raise revenues much more vague and gave them more latitude than the original Constitution offered – or intended.

 

[ams511]

Bill you raise some interesting points. I concede that it has been a long time since I read either the Wealth of Nations or the Communist Manafesto. But going back to the concept of drain and benefit. If you drive a Hummer 100,000 miles a year you do put a drain on the road and consequently a drain on the government. However, through gas taxes you also pay for the drain and the benefit you receive. In contrast look at cigarette taxes, a smoker uses no more public service than a non-smoker. The states in their lawsuit agrued that smokers do cost more because of increased health problems latter in life. A fact they knew since the 60's when the surgeon's general's report came out. Yet no state put their cigarette tax revenue in a fund to defer the costs of smoking related illness or into stop smoking campaigns. It all went into their general funds. I am not aware of any state earmarking cigarette revenue strictly for the benefit of smokers.

The question of what is a luxury good and what is a non-luxury good is open to debate. Why is a $ 20 lobster tail non-taxable while a $ 3.00 half-gallon of ice cream is. That is the rule in Florida.

If you look at national security would not Bill Gates and other wealthy individuals lose more if we were taken over by communists then a normal person? In that case does he not derive a benefit directly proportional to his income?

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, fairness in taxation is also very subjective. We all want government services but want someone else to pay for it. The sad truth of the matter is that the someone else is the future generation who had no input into the decisions.