From: raphael@fx.com (Glen Raphael)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: Some views on Scientology
Message-ID: <1991Aug9.233855.27028@fxgrp.fx.com>
Date: 9 Aug 91 23:38:55 GMT
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mauler@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>raphael@fx.com (Glen Raphael) writes:
>> And what is *right* with the sales tax is:
>> 
>> 1) It is simpler to collect. Can you imagine how many hours are wasted
>> by hundreds of Americans doing their taxes each year? If we abolished
>> the income tax, we could save all that time, and reduce the number of IRS
>> auditors and the power of the IRS accordingly. Wonderful!
>> 

>Use of the sales tax instead of the income tax throws out one major item in
>current income tax laws: deductions.

Another advantage!

>Often cited as the problem since rich
>people use so many of them, it is still the one way people can make the income
>tax less for themselves for good reasons (such as dependents, interest on loans
>to improve one's ability and status, medical bills, etc.).  Can you imagine the
>paperwork required to figure out how much of every food item was eaten by a
>dependent?  Or the meticulous records required to claim a business deduction
>for gas and repairs to a car?  The paperwork required to make such a system
>fair would be ten times as much as is required for the current income tax
>system.  (which just happens to throw out point #1...)

Nope. There shouldn't be any deductions at all. That's the primary reason
millions of man-hours are wasted each year on taxes. Why should gas and
repairs to a car be a deduction and food not be? Why do single people
subsidize married ones? It's all fairly random, and influenced not so much
by a notion of "fairness" as by who has the strongest lobby.

Look, you're missing the basic point here. A supermarket owner has to do
a certain amount of bookkeeping anyway. He has to know how much money he
made each year, and what his income was, and what his expenses were. 
He can pay a portion of his sales for the year to the state. Normal people
shouldn't have to pay attention to all that stuff. There is no reason on
earth why I should *have* to know exactly how much money I made this year.
And there's no reason the state should care. By only collecting taxes from
businesses rather than individuals, the IRS's job would be reduced by one
or two orders of magnitude! Because (1) there aren't as many businesses
as individuals, and (2) businesses have accountants and bookkeepers and
can be expected to keep track of everything.

>> 2) The progressive income tax discourages people from making money, by
>> reducing the link between how productive you are and how much take-home
>> pay you end up with. This is bad for the economy as a whole, including
>> the poor.

>So how would a sales tax help any?  That REALLY obscures the link between
>productivity and take-home pay.

Nope. The link is direct. The more productive you are, the more take-home
pay you get. The state doesn't take any of it away at that end. Now as for
what that take-home pay will *buy*, that will be less. But you can see that
in what stuff costs in the stores.

>People would prefer to know right now and take a fixed tax, rather
>than know nothing now and get the potential for a lesser tax, as well as the
>potential for a greater tax.

The sales that *is* a fixed tax. It's a fixed tax that raises the price of
goods.

>However much you may say about the American
>public's variable support for anything, they all want secure jobs and secure
>lives, and a variable, unpredictable sales tax INSTEAD OF a fixed income tax 
>and a low sales tax would cause so much confusion and outrage that they might
>actually get off their butts and vote for the old system back!

Why should a sales tax be "variable and unpredictable"? Suppose there were a
15% sales tax. How is that "variable"?

Glen Raphael
raphael@fx.com