On Monday, August 5, 2013 9:39:31 AM UTC-4, dgk wrote:
Republicans have been on board with that for decades. Even some

Democrats. They want lower tax rates, get rid of most tax breaks.

That results in a simpler, fairer tax system. It takes the power

to fiddle with tax breaks away from Congress. It's the loon libs that won't have any of it.





The main problem with the flat tax proposals is that there are many

variants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax



Most that I've seen simply tax salary and leave unearned income alone.

Not really fair to most of the workers.



Show me what you believe is a flat tax proposal. I'm all in favor of

making paying taxes simple, but the vast majority of rules and

regulations don't apply to me. My taxes are pretty simple. The

complications are put there by people with a lot of money that need

sheltering. And, while we're at it, tax religious institutions.

First, I assume it's individual income taxes that you're
talking about, but same idea applies to corp as well.
I agree that there are a lot of obvious issues that need
to be addressed. I think we're on the same page, that basically
all income should be taxed the same, whether it's from salary,
interest, capital gains, etc. Then you wouldn't have folks
like Warren Buffet paying tax at a lower rate than someone
who is salaried. And you wouldn't have all the economic distortions caused by people structuring their business/investment decisions to avoid high tax rates. The key is that the rate needs to be low enough, probably in the range of 20 - 25%.

As for taxing religious institutions, as long as the money
is being used for charitable purposes, I have no problem with
that remaining tax exempt. If a charity earns $1mil on investments and uses it to feed the poor, I don't see why
that needs to be taxed.