For many years, Americans assumed that the great majority of money available to be taxed, was earned income. After all, everybody works, everybody generates income, and it seems fair to tax this money as it comes in. It was the bulk of money earned in the United States. After all, the USA was the place to be, to earn a good income. Since the Reagan administration, we have created a different kind of America.
Now, most people work. Families with two income earners who are both a little above average get to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax that was designed for millionaires, back in the 1960’s. The AMT taxes these families – ordinary middle class people – so they pay more than 50% of their income in taxes of one kind or another.
Hedge Fund managers, who are more clever than the rest of us, pay 15% on their incomes, which are sometimes in the hundreds of millions per year. Many investors (the very wealthy) pay nothing at all, as is the case for more than 20% of large US Corporations.
The Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v Valeo that money is free speech, and it must be protected as a person. Diogenes has always thought that money is not exactly the same as a person, but maybe that reasoning was just wrong.
There is no reason to limit taxes to individuals and corporations. The Commonwealth of Virginia has an idea that everything owned by a person is taxable. If you live in Richmond, the piano in your living room is taxable. So are the big-screen TV’s. The courts have never ruled that personal property of every kind is not taxable.
Diogenes proposes a new Democrat Flat Tax.: a tax of one half of one per cent of the value of everything of value in the United States. In the early days of the Republic, it would not have been possible to make a list of every asset in the whole country. But we now have Government computers that have recorded every telephone conversation and every e-mail message in the United States, for the last six years. Evidently, it is perfectly lawful for the Government to make a note of every communication to every citizen and every resident in the whole country, and quite a few who are not in the country. By comparison, a list of every asset should be a piece of cake.
Diogenes suggests that the Democrat Flat Tax be applied on strictly free-market principles, including total transparency.
Each year, every piece of property in the United States would be taxed at one half of one per cent, that would be paid by the person or corporation that claims ownership of that property. To encourage people to file a tax return, Diogenes suggests that any piece of property that is not reported, be considered unclaimed, subject to being claimed by the Government and auctioned off to bidders for the benefit of the national treasury.
Likewise, to encourage people to correctly value their property, every item of property listed with a value, and taxed according to that value, would be listed on a Government authorized website. Anybody who had an interest in such a property, and who thought the property was valued incorrectly, could buy it by offering two or more times the value listed. This system works for race-horses, in claiming races. Diogenes suggests that President Bush’s friend Michael Brown might be consulted about setting up this kind of tax, as he has the background in equine bloodstock.
The genius of the free market can be unleashed to help to get us out of the financial hole the Bush administration has dug us into. Greed is good, after all, and if a lot of smart and well educated people who cannot get a job because nothing is actually made in the United States any more, happen to notice that some people have things that they are not paying taxes on, they ought to be able to do a patriotic act, and benefit from it. The way Halliburton has been doing, but on a smaller scale.
Like the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy that were enacted in 2001, nobody has any idea how much this wealth tax – uh – Democrat Flat Tax would bring in. So we don’t have to budget for it. Whatever comes in will go directly to reducing the deficit, and when that is paid off, the excess can go to the Social Security Trust Fund so the people who were born when Ronald Reagan was President, might actually be able to retire some day.
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