RAVE THIS if you think BILLIONAIRES should PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE!!!!!

Your view of the economic situation is seen with blinders on.
When the companies pay the workers a living wage, and make less profit for themselves, the lower part of the economic strata will be able to pay their share. You can not get blood from a stone, yet the top refuses to pay workers what the workers need to survive.
It is a two way street, but the top wants it to be ONE WAY only and that will not work.
You need people with money at the bottom to buy what you have for sale. The more the top takes in profits creates an imbalance which will only get worse. The top brought this on themselves by believing that they are alone in the society.
They skewed the system, like living in style, but forget how they got there, and that money going one way has to come to an end, and it will, just as it did in 1929.
The system fostered by the top, for the top, will collapse without having a large and sustainable middle class. That is something (thanks to Reagan) that we lost in the 1980's and without it, the country can not survive.
This is not just about taxes, it is about a sustainable economic system, something we do not have at the moment because of the greed of the top wage earners and market profiteers.
A higher top tax always leads to economic growth.



The numbers at the bottom are the tax rate, not years.
Greatest growth comes with higher tax.

Why can't the LibProgs ever tell us exactly how much is a "fair share"?

And why should we tax INCOME? If you want less of something tax it. If you want more of something, subsidize it. So what does our Liberal Democrats and RINO Republicans do? They tax INCOME and subsidize POVERTY!
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If you really want a fair method of collecting tax revenue, then tax consumption instead of taxing income. That way WEALTH gets taxed, because eventually all wealth is spent or reinvested. Today, someone can own billions of dollars worth of assets, but if they don't earn any income, they don't pay taxes. But eventually ALL WEATH gets spent, either by those who earned it, or by those who inherited it. We like having wealth invested, so leave it alone, but when it is SPENT on consumption, then tax it.

The FairTax Bill (HR-25/S-13) does exactly that. It taxes consumption while not taxing used goods, investments, educational tuition or "Business -to- Business" transactions.
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Here's what Lanny Davis has to say about this important reform proposal:

Lanny Davis: "The Fair Tax -- At Least Worth a Debate?"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com...

"OK, everyone -- time to take a breath and consider a new idea. Well, not really a new idea. It is called the Fair Tax plan and was conceived in 1998 by a nonpartisan group out of Houston called Americans for Fair Taxation.

The simple proposal: Apply a 23 percent consumption tax paid once at the point of purchase of all new retail goods and services, while eliminating all other taxes in America -- that's right, all. That means no more income tax, personal or corporate; Social Security or Medicare payroll tax; dividends or capital gains tax; gift taxes; the estate tax or the Alternative Minimum Tax.

The Fair Tax plan reduces some of the regressive effect of a consumption tax by paying those who live at or below the poverty level a Family Consumption Allowance, or "pre-bate," on purchases of "basic necessities." One expert on the Fair Tax wrote me that a family of four at or below the poverty level would receive a $565 pre-bate payment the first of each month.

The 23 percent consumption tax level is set in order to keep federal revenues neutral -- meaning the revenues estimated to be generated by a 23 percent consumption tax would be about equal to current revenues generated by the income and all other taxes. That's the theory, anyway. Proponents also argue that goods and services prices will not go up because the 23 percent consumption tax is about the same as the "embedded" 22 percent tax in all goods and services needed to pay for current taxes.

Among positive effects, proponents claim the national consumption tax would:

- Encourage savings and investments (since income is not taxed);

- Eliminate an estimated $300-450 billion per year spent by Americans on tax compliance;

- Cause the repatriation of an estimated $12-15 trillion that are hidden in offshore accounts in order to avoid or escape U.S. taxation -- and, once returned home, would cause interest rates to fall as increased capital becomes available for investments;

- Result in increased job creation -- given the higher levels of investment from the greater available capital;

- Provide a sustainable and stable source of revenue for Social Security and Medicare, since there will always be 300 million-plus consumers purchasing at least necessities every month; and

- Have positive environmental effects because it leaves untaxed old and used goods, encouraging people to use and re-use things rather than consuming natural resources to create new things.

Critics cite such disadvantages as the loss of the hundreds of thousands of tax-related jobs (such as IRS employees, income tax preparers, tax software vendors and -- yes! -- tax-break lobbyists). And elimination of the popular mortgage interest deduction will be controversial (i.e., no income tax, thus, no need to deduct anything). But some economists claim reduced interest rates under the Fair Tax will more than offset the loss of mortgage interest deductibility.

Look, I'm skeptical -- especially with the notion that the retail prices will drop 23 percent dollar-for-dollar due to the absence of the "embedded" taxes, so that prices won't go up when a 23 percent consumption tax is added; or that interest rates will drop enough to offset the loss of mortgage interest deductibility. I am also skeptical because -- full disclosure -- I have relied for much of this column on the often unreliable Wikipedia Fair Tax write-up and material found on the not-objective Fair Tax website.

My biggest problem with the Fair Tax idea is the fact that it is revenue-neutral. Yes, it's interesting to examine the possible positive social and economic effects of eliminating all taxation based on income. But my focus remains on the need for liberals and conservatives to join hands and raise taxes and cut spending at the same time -- as Bill Clinton bravely did in 1994 -- and begin to balance our budgets and pay down the more than $13 trillion national debt.

Next week I will begin a series of columns on the Bowles-Simpson Commission proposal -- and why I believe it represents the best, and only, hope for stopping the credit card addiction that immorally, in my judgment, leaves our children and grandchildren to pay for our lack of fiscal discipline.
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Lanny Davis is the principal in the Washington D.C. law firm of Lanny J. Davis & Associates, which specializes in strategic crisis management and is a partner with Josh Block in the strategic communications and public affairs company Davis-Block. He served as President Clinton's Special Counsel in 1996-98 and as a member of President Bush's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in 2006-07. He is the author of "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics Is Destroying America" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Joyce: "The Fair Tax is no such thing because there is no "fair" way to rob people"

Joyce, the "FairTax" is a noun. It's the name of an existing bill in congress that currently has over SIX dozen bipartisan congressional cosponsors.

You say there is no fair way to rob people? True, but if everyone was "robbed" equally, wouldn't that be 'fair'? Besides, the FairTax is voluntary. You know exactly what the tax is before YOU CHOOSE to pay it.

Of course being a consumption tax, you gotta consume stuff... but the point is YOU choose when, where and how much you pay by the amount of stuff you CHOOSE to buy, and what stuff you buy.

A working single mom, earning $30k chould choose to buy a used car with untaxed income in a sale of an item that is not subject to the tax because it is used.

She could take night school classes and pay the untaxed tuition with untaxed earnings, because the income tax system would be abolished under the FairTax...

Suddenly she can use her new found job skills to get a higher paying job and drive her used car to that job. And her employer would have moved his new factory here instead of building it overseas, because there is no sales tax imposed on the products he sells to global markets AND there is no corporate income tax on the profits made here in the U.S. Just think of the thousands of new start-up businesses that could afford to get off the ground if they didn't even have to FILE an income tax return, much less pay any income taxes!

Yes, you are right. But a simple consumption tax, that refunds to everyone all taxes on spending up to the poverty level would COMPLETELY untax the poor and provide incentive for all of the rest of us to make more money because we would not be punished for our success as we are under the current regime. You say the prebate feature puts everone on the dole. If that's your view, do you also feel that your tax refund from your April 15th tax filing also puts people on the dole? Becuase that's all the prebate is... a refund of taxes paid on spending up to the poverty level.

When you, me Bill Gates, Oprah, Trump, Warren Buffett or his secretary buy that Big Mac, Fries and Coke, they all pay exactly the same sales tax....and all get exactly the same prebate based on their family size. If an illegal immigrant or a legal tourist from Japan, China or Europe buys anything in a retail store, they would pay the same sales tax as the citizen... only they wouldn't get the prebate check every month.

In my book, the current system is a SLAVE tax. It imposes a direct lien against every penny you will ever earn, save or accrue over your lifetime...and beyond. The "owner" of you collects his profit, right off the top, before you ever see one dime of your "take-home" pay. The Plantation Massah only allows you to keep just enough to keep you happy and entertained. The Plantation Massah provides you with education, healthcare, housing and food... and taxes the crap out of the most productive slaves while rewarding the non-producive slaves. With the FairTax, slavery would finally be abolished once and for all.

With an income tax, your money is SEIZED.
With the FairTax, your money is PAID.

The difference is YOUR freedom to choose.

Joyce: "the "Fair Tax" isn't just a tax on working. It is a tax on living because we can't live without consuming, and it taxes even the food we have to eat to survive."

Hmmm, I guess you didn't notice the part about the prebate feature. The Fairtax "pre"-imburses to you all taxes on spending up to the poverty level, thereby providing you with the basic necessities of life without penalty of taxation. You only pay the sales tax on spending above that level of basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter... or whatever YOU choose to spend your refunded tax on.

Yes, you are correct in that you cannot live without consuming. But you can and do choose what you consume and contrary to your statement, the FairTax is NOT a tax on WORKING. You can work and produce all you desire untaxed. If you earn Millions of Dollars and don't spend anything more than poverty level of spending, you PAY NO TAXES.

The FairTax is a selective tax on consumption, and YOU are the one that makes the selections when you choose to buy something.

All taxes are an imposition...or theft, as you say. But if you can choose the amount, degree and timing of that theft, you have the opportunity to mitigate the impact that government has on your personal life and your "pursuit of happiness".

Even those that earn more than poverty level, when you concider that the purchase of non-taxable items such as used goods, investments, tuition and the prebate feature, it is completely possible to "survive without consuming" items that are subject to the sales tax.

If you have a better way of funding the constitutionaly mandated cost of our government, please let me know. But as the FairTax is the best one I've found, that's the horse that I'm riding.

Please Joyce, give me a viable alternative.

The top CONTROL 85% of the wealth, but do not necessarily create it. There is a big difference between working for a living and living off of investments that make money on the backs of the lower class.
What CEO who gets paid 25 million with stock options actually does more work than those making the product?

"... the Bush-era tax cuts have been in place for a decade, and the unemployment rate is still 9.1 percent. And executive compensation has grown. Executives may feel entitled to earn more and more if their companies are doing well and expanding. But without customers, those companies will go bust."

This has always been the way that capitalism has rewarded(?) those who actually produce something.
Moving from one state to the other just perpetuates an unfair (to the worker) system. The companies have no lower costs, so the top makes more money, the disparity just increases.
Because the state tax is lower, do they pay their workers more? Or do they just pocket more for themselves?
It is a fact that the opposite of what you propose happens. We in the US have the highest real growth in GDP when the top tax was 75% or higher. That is something that every tax cut proponent and GOP conservative seems to ignore. The fact that tax cuts create jobs has been disproved time and time again.

Corporate Tax Cuts Don't Stimulate Job Growth
June 20, 2011 by Susan Milligan
"Prevailing conservative wisdom dictates that businesses need tax cuts—and investors need capital gains tax cuts—to get the economy moving. But two very well-executed articles on wages and taxes published recently suggest that targeting tax cuts at business executives may do little to improve the dismal unemployment picture.
The Washington Post offers a startling analysis of income disparity, noting that the gap between the very rich and the rest of us has grown dramatically in the past few decades, reaching current levels that have not been seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the Post reports, the top one-tenth of one percent of earners took in more than a tenth of the personal income in the United States. But the moneyed class is not dominated by professional athletes or big-name artistic performers or even hedge fund managers, the Post found. Instead, it is due to a big increase in executive compensation, even as real wages for some of their workers have dropped:
The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms. An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories.
The New York Times has a fascinating story that serves as an unwitting companion piece to the Post story. Corporate executives, the paper reports, are clamoring for a tax holiday to encourage them to bring their offshore profits back to the United States. And the money in question is big, the Times notes: Apple has $12 billion in offshore cash, while Google has $17 billion, and Microsoft, $29 billion. The companies with money sitting offshore argue that if the federal government were to offer them a huge tax break—say, a one-year drop from 35 percent to 5.25 percent—the businesses would bring the money home and operate as a private-sector economic stimulus.

However, the Times notes:
"...(T)hat’s not how it worked last time. Congress and the Bush administration offered companies a similar tax incentive, in 2005, in hopes of spurring domestic hiring and investment, and 800 took advantage. Though the tax break lured them into bringing $312 billion back to the United States, 92 percent of that money was returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, according to a study by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research."

Who needs a tax cut, then? The U.S. economy is very much consumer-driven; companies aren’t hiring, many business owners say, because people aren’t buying. The past behavior of corporations that have received huge tax cuts has not necessarily been to use the money to hire more people; the Bush-era tax cuts have been in place for a decade, and the unemployment rate is still 9.1 percent. And executive compensation has grown. Executives may feel entitled to earn more and more if their companies are doing well and expanding. But without customers, those companies will go bust.