Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax reform plan

Best guess would be you should have at max 16K withheld from your paychecks every yeah unless one of you is self-employed.

 

fair enough, but i'm not sure how it's relevant to the discussion then.

 

Welfare is the biggest tax burden in this country

Fix it, and a lot of the tax mess is fixed

JMO though

 

I like it in principle but see the following problems:

1) does shift burden (some of that I'm okay with) - should exempt food and/or first "$x" of family spending from national sales tax.
2) opens the door to the national sales tax that later Congress's can raise - it would never go away and represents a new revenue stream.

I prefer a simplified tax code with maybe 3 marginal rates and considerably fewer deductions/credits - similar to the Debt Commission recommendation and/or Ryan plan.

 

Would any of the rates be safe?

 

No but we wouldn't be adding a new revenue stream

 

by more of the burden, do you mean some?

 

amazing how a candidate, with a serious plan of reforming the current tax code, will bring out defenders of the current tax code

 

I see what you are saying. I am just saying that a sales tax eats into the disposable income of a well-off person. So what does it eat into for a person with no real disposable income?

 

So criticizing a proposed plan is the same as defending the current one? Fascinating. Criticizing the proposed nomination of Ron Paul is the same as supporting Obama.

 

didn't say that, all I'm saying is that everyone agrees that the current tax code is unfair and is a major burden on the economy. Along comes a serious plan to reform/replace the current US tax system and suddenly you have people defending the IRS. Cain's plan isn't perfect and he's really going to have to answer in more detail who his advisers were on it.

there are even some on the right claiming that 999 will create an unnecessary burden on the "poor", why is expecting everyone to contribute "draconian" but wanting to increase the burden on the successful considered "fair"?

 

Like I said, it has to do with disposable income. Paying 9 % more on something means a lot when you have narrow margins as it is.

I am speaking about math and finance, you are speaking about philosophy.

 

the theory is that when you lower the cost of doing business, business will pass that savings along to the customer by lowering prices, couple that with the fact that the payroll tax is eliminated, and the burden on the poor is mitigated, especially when you combine that with the "prebate" portion of the Fair Tax

why should someone who is poor not have any responsibility to the system that provides the safety net he or she uses? yes, that's philosophical, but you can't continue shifting the burden to an ever smaller percentage of the population

 

I don't know that the theory goes into practice these days.

If there is a prebate, I don't have as much of a beef with it. Although that goes back to the problem of conditioning people to expect a check from the government, even if it is technically money they had to begin with.

 

Are you baiting me into LGisms, haha?

I have no doubt our super rich will find a way to endure.

[video]http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-21-2011/moneybrawl---the-extinction-of-subway--bill-o-reilly---the-super-rich[/video]

 

I agree that more should share the tax burden MG. However, the theory you speak of is just that, an educated guess. I have seen little evidence that lower costs will equate to a drop in the price of everyday goods. It just hasn't happened that way. Companies have moved to Mexico and overseas to lower costs, but that has not been reflected in prices while many corporations are reaping record profits. If it guaranteed lower prices, I could be more easily persuaded to support the measure. I am just a skeptic to most of this talk.

 

HD TVs selling for 30% of what they sold 5 years ago doesn't indicate that lower costs equate to lower prices?

 

I would say that most all technology of this sort gets cheaper and smaller over time. See VCRs. It's not the reults of lower taxes.

 

who is reaping record profits? Do you mean margins? Clearly, cheaper input pricing yields lower retail pricing. I think we have seen a couple of very expensive commodity prices impact overall pricing over the past couple of years, or we'd all be seeing lower pricing. Competition is just too rampant to let big margins remain a staple of the marketplace.

 

considering google among others use every opportuity to book revenue overseas rather than here we can safetly assume that taxes are some sort of impediment to companies doing business here.