@Cycloptichorn,
Cycloptichorn wrote:... a [flat] tax favors the rich heavily, because their money doesn't come from a job - it comes from investment income. How do you account for the lack of a Cap Gains tax in your scheme?
Cycloptichorn, you are wrong again!
Yes, there are
some rich folks whose only income comes from their investments, but it is those investments that have enabled those rich folks to sustain and create jobs for other folks. If their incomes were to be reduced via taxes, their spending and additional investments would be reduced and not be available for creating jobs for more folks---rich, poor, and in between.
Most rich folks get their income from working either for themselves or for other people. It is these rich folks that via their work, their spending, and their investing also create jobs for more folks. Reduce their income via taxes and you reduce their spending and additional investments, that would otherwise end up creating more jobs for more folks, rich, poor, and in between.
It makes far more sense to enable the private economy rather than the federal economy to spend and invest far more. What
invidious folks do not or refuse to understand is that the rich do far more to improve the economy for everyone than does the federal government. Invidious folks act like they are programmed to prefer equalization of wealth regardless of the pain that will cause everyone but them.
Roosevelt did not end the 1930's depression until the 1940s, when the unemployment rate dropped "like a stone" below 3% from above 15%. He ended it when he had the federal government buy products, commodities, and services from the private economy to support the US's participation in WWII.
Obama should have taken an equivalent approach to end the US's current depression. Yes, he should have advocated that the federal government buy stuff from the private sector, instead of
giving away so much federal money like Roosevelt did in the 1930s. Had Obama done that he would have obtained bipartisan support, and the private sector's income and jobs would have climbed back up---and so would have federal revenue from the
current tax system.
You might ask, what could Obama's federal government
buy from the private sector today that would not constitute
give-aways? How about:
(1) greater support for the military to more quickly win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;
(2) better healthcare for wounded military veterans;
(3) new nuclear power plants to reduce the US's dependency on foreign oil;
(4) better systems for disposing of nuclear wastes;
(5) improvements in the current US's interstate transportation system--land, water, air;
(6) expand and develop new energy production facilities;
(7) expansion and acceleration of NASA's space program?