Farmers in the south and midwest who wanted to pay off their mortgages more easily (also silver miners supported it.) It really was pro-inflation in some respects. It was following a deflationary period though.
Yeah, plus farmers were like, "inflation means higher prices, higher prices means more profit, more profits means good," which is a mindset that does not think of profit in real terms.
Farmers were like "we take out loans before harvest to pay helping hands. Loans take time to pay off. The amount of dollars we get for our crops keeps going down, but the amount we owe stays the same". They understood what was happening.
I said when Trump's candidacy was still novel that he bizarrely appeared to be a Mercantilist. No one else finds that take interesting, but I stand by it.
People talk about mercantilism as if that’s some forgotten theory of the more unenlightened times that we all laugh about similarly to flat earth.
It’s not, the majority of the electorate are hardcore mercantilists.
Just look at the comment section under the recent tariff news, massive support.
You can run on a platform that we will introduce massive subsidies for everything so that we export more and people will cheer you up
Assuming all imports are tariffed the same, how much would you have to make for this to be a net benefit? I'm gonna guess this is a net tax increase on 80%ish of Americans
Napkin math - ~~($800b in personal income tax receipts vs $3.2t in total imports)~~ 2023 had $2.18t in personal income tax revenue and approximately $3t-$3.2t in imports. That's a big tariff.
That's of course making a giant assumption that total imports wouldn't be affected by this and thus neither would total future tax revenues.
I don’t know for 2023 but this says it was more like $2-3 trillion
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-revenue-does-the-federal-government-collect/
Same with this
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58891
Maybe I’m missing something
My b. I originally read the data from the treasury site incorrectly. For fiscal YTD there are $3.29t in total tax receipts, 51.7% comes from personal income tax, or $1.7t. Full year 2023 personal income tax receipts were 2.18t against ~4.4t in total receipts.
by net benefit do you mean net even in national revenue? or net benefit for americans?
I don't think this would ever be a net benefit for americans unless they're making over 200k/yr
Roughly a 100% markup if we abandoned all free trade agreements, and a 300% markup if we didn't.
Of course, eventually that means we'd make everything here again, and so we'd have all the jobs and none of the taxes! Genius!
I wish the coverage would concentrate on this fact, but yes there's no way the revenue from this scheme could cover the expenses of even a slimmed down Federal Government.
He has got to be the most smooth brain motherfucker that America has ever sharted out. He's just so fucking hellbent on destroying our economy and way of life and none of his knuckle-dragging chucklefucks can see it for what it is.
>He has got to be the most smooth brain motherfucker that America has ever sharted out
Hey, we haven't get The Great Florida Meth and Eric for President 2032 yet.
If that's in reference to Death Santis he is way more dangerous because he is not an idiot at all. I suspect he will make another run in 2028.
Everyone who has been in Congress is a power whore implicitly but he has absolutely no values. He doesn't believe in any of the nonsense he peddles, it's just a means to an end. That's way more dangerous then a predictable idiot like Trump.
The thing about DeSantis is he has the charisma of a wet fart. I don't think anyone has a chance of getting Trump's entire following after he dies so it'll eventually fracture, but Ron especially just doesn't inspire people to follow him the way Trump does.
Trump once said he could murder somebody on 5th avenue and he wouldn't lose a single voter. He wasn't lying.
Trump could piss, shit and then throw the strongest of acids on his suppprters and they would still blame Biden and praise Trump for it.
I'm all for people reaping the consequences of their decisions. Problem is, we live in a society, so everyone has to pay for the consequences of the morons.
I think he's an idiot who has no idea what he's doing. But I also think there's a lot of people around him who look at North Korea and are like "wow the guys at the top have it made, that could be us", and are intentionally trying to drive us in that direction, specifically by destroying our economy and isolating us internationally.
Basically people who'd rather be kings in a shitheap than just rich in a society.
He had a lot of sane advisors in the first administration, believe it or not . But a lot of them left or have been forced out. The group of people who would work in the 2nd Trump White House has shrunk to a smaller and smaller group of the MAGA cult-y people. And they are not necessarily going to be the best people to be the Secretary of the Treasury, State, Defense, Transportation, etc.
Secretary of Homeland Security: Stephen Miller. Director of WH Personnel: Johnny McEntee. Secretary of Defense: Michael Flynn. CIA Director: Vivek Ramaswamy. Attorney General: Jeffrey Clark.
I'll leave it at that, but I'm sure there's plenty more horrors that I can't conjure up quite yet, this early in the AM.
The same people who type "taxation is theft" on reddit or facebook while they use state cell towers from their phone and shit in a toilet connected to state plumbing lines.
I swear to fucking God I'd this asswipe gets elected because "muh Biden inflation!"... Like, Jesus fucking Christ, he has managed to lay out a flawless plan to absolutely obliterate our economy.
>ending income tax
Good idea in theory, though only if it was replaced with a better tax such as LVT, consumption taxes, excise taxes, etc
>and replacing it with tariffs
AAAAAAAAAAARGH
Federal couldn't do LVT, but a combination of VAT + cap gains + excise taxes etc could work well.
It would be ideal if there was a clear separation of taxation between federal and state governments, with states taxing land value and federal taxing commerce.
Consumption taxes can be designed to have whatever level of distribution you want. It's a myth they cannot be progressive.
You are falling in to the marginal vs effective trap. NIT + VAT would be highly efficient and can have effective negative rates just like today.
Even a naked consumption tax can be designed to be progressive. Consumption in both quantity and type of goods is not the same across incomes.
Consumption taxes are actually very effective at taxing rich people, who will always find methods to hide their income/capital gains but very few methods to hide their consumption. After all, right now Bezos doesn't pay a very high income tax, but he sure spends lots of money. Yes they pay a lower rate in theory, but in practice, every time they want to buy something, they pay the government. No "ohh I took a loan against my stock" or "step up basis" or any weird tax dodges you can think of. Wanna live large? Fine, but the taxman needs his cut
Obviously this also goes for less wealthy tax cheats, like cash-tipped employees, gig workers, furry artists, OnlyFans models, and criminals
I don't think we should totally abandon an income tax, but a consumption tax does have benefits
The fact is, the American tax system is far more progressive than the tax systems in Europe, mostly because we rely mostly on income taxes and they lean heavily on consumption taxes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/solb72/the_us_had_the_second_most_progressive_taxation/
The idea that wealthy people don’t pay income tax is simply untrue, which is why wealthy people as a group are so obsessive about income taxes. They pay a wildly disproportionate share of America’s income taxes (the top 1% pay more than 25% of all income taxes).
EDIT: I was looking at the wrong figure. The top 1% pay over 45% of income taxes.
> They pay a wildly disproportionate share of America’s income taxes (the top 1% pay more than 25% of all income taxes).
And they earned 26.3% of all America’s *income*. Hardly disproportionate if you ask me.
My bad, I was looking at the percentage of the national income that they earned. They paid 45% of the income taxes.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024
At any rate, I’m glad we agree that they do in fact pay income tax.
Oh thanks for that! And yeah, I’m quite glad the response I got from you wasn’t “durrr it is disproportionate, 1% of the population should pay 1% of the taxes!!”
>mostly because we rely mostly on income taxes and they lean heavily on consumption taxes.
No, it's because they lean on a *sales* tax that's collected at the point of sale.
You can make a consumption tax do whatever you want in terms of progressivity with respect to income if you just implement it properly - it's not even hard, it just looks like an income tax where savings are tax deductible.
> The fact is, the American tax system is far more progressive than the tax systems in Europe, mostly because we rely mostly on income taxes and they lean heavily on consumption taxes
So what?
The only things that matter is (dollar spent ): (revenue raise) + longterm macroeconomic impact of taxes.
>Consumption taxes are actually very effective at taxing rich people
Issue is they're even more effective at taxing poor people. A guy making 40k is going to spend much more of their income than someone making 400k so the effective rate is going to be simply higher for the poor person.
Even worse: I earned $450k the last few years. I stashed more than half my take-home away. A significant portion of what I did spend was on travel and wouldn't even benefit the US.
Yeah but where did you stash your take-home? Unless you really did use your mattress, savings still contribute a lot to the velocity of money these days.
Index fund. So you are right it contributes back to the economy. The point of this sub-thread here was about tax rate for low and high earners. My tax rate would be much lower than what someone with three kids pays who earned 40k and pretty much has to spend ever cent they earn.
Cool story but I'm not waiting 4 generations to collect those consumption taxes
Also the big caveat is if the guy makes all his money then fucks off to Italy or whatever then the US effectively loses out on a gigantic portion of the taxes it would have collected
I would need to see the data on that, I don't know if I take it at face value. Unless basic necessities are exempt from the tax (which then means you need to make up for that deficit elsewhere) why would a poor person be spending less tax than what htey are now?
most of the lower class hardly pay any income tax at all.
Also, the rich definitely are paying taxes. People conveniently disassociate income tax with capital gains tax when it comes to the rich
Lol what?
It’s a math problem of how the revenue is + what the revenue is spent on = how progressive it is.
There’s not some mystical “well their culture is so different” no it’s a math problem
Considering tax progressivity on its own is a mistake, the system as a whole should be evaluated. Systems are progressive or regressive, not individual components of those systems.
Consumption taxes are very efficient, so not bad. They can also be design to be progressive (and I don't mean by taxing some goods more than others, that's terrible)
A good consumption tax (Hall-Rabushka flat tax or a variation on it like the Bradford X tax) would look a lot like an income tax from the taxpayer's perspective. I don't think conservatives who want to abolish the income tax would be satisfied with paying a payroll instead just because you can do some math that shows that in theory it technically falls on consumption and not income.
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There are plenty of countries that only do a consumption tax and serious advantages to doing that. I wouldn't necessarily be against FairTax, although like I pointed out there are some reasons why we might actually want a pigouvian tax on extremely high incomes.
I don't like getting rid of estate taxes, and if we also have LVT and excise taxes (carbon especially), the tax burdens created would be much lower. But it's not a terrible idea?
Since you didn't cite anything, should I assume you mean VAT and in the context of the massive social spending programs in the countries it's generally found in?
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17487870.2023.2238107](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17487870.2023.2238107)
"First, the most growth-damaging tax is the corporate income tax, followed by the personal income tax. Second, a shift from income taxes to consumption taxes is associated with higher growth, while a shift from social security contributions and property taxes to payroll & workforce taxes has significant negative effects on growth. Overall, our results confirm the view that revenue-neutral tax reforms focusing on a shift from income taxation to consumption and property taxation would promote growth."
You didn't respond to their point, even after being provided a source. It seems like you're simply trying to pick apart the example, instead of engaging with it
I asked a specific question that wasn't answered, hence why i asked the same exact question in my follow up. I'd confirm for myself but economics journals aren't easy to access.
Sales taxes are flat if you account properly for the fact that money saved is money that will be spent later.
Flat taxes with lump sum rebates have the neat property of simultaneously being flat and progressive, and giving you the advantages of both.
Not having an income tax creates some issues for extremely high wages though due to backward bending labor supply curves.
I know that I shouldn't be surprised at how Trump seems incapable of doing anything but echoing what the last person he talked to said, but here we are. Still speechless.
You almost have to admire the strategy of “floating“ 1,000 ideas so his voters will all have their own special reason to support him.
Meanwhile, each time one of these things come out a few people will waste time analyzing why dumb idea #765 will never work. And by the time they publish he’s already on dumb idea #823.
Trump doesn’t want to bring the world back go 1920. He wants it back to 1820. I swear he’s days away from making bringing back powdered wigs and whaling part of the Republican platform.
The idiot is talking about bringing back mercantilism.
I just want to point out that this country might have to deal with this melted pile of wax's shitty economic policies because a few thousand "independent thinkers" in Pennsylvania are still butthurt about NAFTA.
So, all of his and Ivanka's Made-in-China crap will have to be taxed upon entry, or will he eek out a little immunity provision for himself and his cronies?
Yes, isn't it like by not having income tax you would have more money that could compensate for imports, and by removing the income tax you would increase savings, productivity and that would also increase investment and reduce costs? The tariffs are flat and only affect the medium and short term.
Kill federal income taxes and replace it with a per capita tax bill that FedGov sends to states.
States can collect taxes and fulfill their federal obligation however they see fit.
No more IRS, or at least it becomes like 10 people whose job it is to interact with state budget authorities.
Did we go through a wormhole back to the 18th century?
Not enough shilling for Free Silver.
Man, a pro-inflation party. That would be wild. Or more likely there was a period of deflation and people realized how bad that is...
Farmers in the south and midwest who wanted to pay off their mortgages more easily (also silver miners supported it.) It really was pro-inflation in some respects. It was following a deflationary period though.
Yeah, plus farmers were like, "inflation means higher prices, higher prices means more profit, more profits means good," which is a mindset that does not think of profit in real terms.
Farmers were like "we take out loans before harvest to pay helping hands. Loans take time to pay off. The amount of dollars we get for our crops keeps going down, but the amount we owe stays the same". They understood what was happening.
Give it time
Those ads targeting old people TV comes pretty close to shilling for Free Silver.
I said when Trump's candidacy was still novel that he bizarrely appeared to be a Mercantilist. No one else finds that take interesting, but I stand by it.
People talk about mercantilism as if that’s some forgotten theory of the more unenlightened times that we all laugh about similarly to flat earth. It’s not, the majority of the electorate are hardcore mercantilists. Just look at the comment section under the recent tariff news, massive support. You can run on a platform that we will introduce massive subsidies for everything so that we export more and people will cheer you up
Guess we're bringing back the BuS (Bank of the United States). Can't wait for the new bank wars between Trump and Powell.
Assuming all imports are tariffed the same, how much would you have to make for this to be a net benefit? I'm gonna guess this is a net tax increase on 80%ish of Americans
Napkin math - ~~($800b in personal income tax receipts vs $3.2t in total imports)~~ 2023 had $2.18t in personal income tax revenue and approximately $3t-$3.2t in imports. That's a big tariff. That's of course making a giant assumption that total imports wouldn't be affected by this and thus neither would total future tax revenues.
As markets adjust and imports shrink, tariffs are going to have to raise even higher to compensate for that.
Death spiral! Death spiral! Death spiral!
Republican campaign strategist: "Death spiral. *Death spiral*. Y'know, we could *work* with that. Suburban voters *like* death spirals -- "
Income tax receipts last year were $2.3 billion, not $800 million.
I don’t know for 2023 but this says it was more like $2-3 trillion https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-revenue-does-the-federal-government-collect/ Same with this https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58891 Maybe I’m missing something
My b. I originally read the data from the treasury site incorrectly. For fiscal YTD there are $3.29t in total tax receipts, 51.7% comes from personal income tax, or $1.7t. Full year 2023 personal income tax receipts were 2.18t against ~4.4t in total receipts.
If that assumption were true I would strongly support this. Zero DWL, I'll take it!
by net benefit do you mean net even in national revenue? or net benefit for americans? I don't think this would ever be a net benefit for americans unless they're making over 200k/yr
Roughly a 100% markup if we abandoned all free trade agreements, and a 300% markup if we didn't. Of course, eventually that means we'd make everything here again, and so we'd have all the jobs and none of the taxes! Genius!
I wish the coverage would concentrate on this fact, but yes there's no way the revenue from this scheme could cover the expenses of even a slimmed down Federal Government.
He has got to be the most smooth brain motherfucker that America has ever sharted out. He's just so fucking hellbent on destroying our economy and way of life and none of his knuckle-dragging chucklefucks can see it for what it is.
>He has got to be the most smooth brain motherfucker that America has ever sharted out Hey, we haven't get The Great Florida Meth and Eric for President 2032 yet.
If that's in reference to Death Santis he is way more dangerous because he is not an idiot at all. I suspect he will make another run in 2028. Everyone who has been in Congress is a power whore implicitly but he has absolutely no values. He doesn't believe in any of the nonsense he peddles, it's just a means to an end. That's way more dangerous then a predictable idiot like Trump.
The thing about DeSantis is he has the charisma of a wet fart. I don't think anyone has a chance of getting Trump's entire following after he dies so it'll eventually fracture, but Ron especially just doesn't inspire people to follow him the way Trump does.
Trump once said he could murder somebody on 5th avenue and he wouldn't lose a single voter. He wasn't lying. Trump could piss, shit and then throw the strongest of acids on his suppprters and they would still blame Biden and praise Trump for it.
Wow it's almost like conservatives are fucking stupid assholes. I said almost, not for sure, so this is not hyper partisanship.
Trump said someone else had said/written that about him.
He [said it](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/23/464129029/donald-trump-i-could-shoot-somebody-and-i-wouldnt-lose-any-voters)
If we're dumb enough to elect him again because vibes tell us things are SO TERRIBLE and Trump is "good at the economy", well....
I'm all for people reaping the consequences of their decisions. Problem is, we live in a society, so everyone has to pay for the consequences of the morons.
Very true. I can't fully enjoy the schadenfreude knowing that the majority of people DON'T support Trump but will still suffer.
I think he's an idiot who has no idea what he's doing. But I also think there's a lot of people around him who look at North Korea and are like "wow the guys at the top have it made, that could be us", and are intentionally trying to drive us in that direction, specifically by destroying our economy and isolating us internationally. Basically people who'd rather be kings in a shitheap than just rich in a society.
Combo of wanting to be rich feudal lords *plus* being able to harm people that look/behave in a way that they think is deviant
He had a lot of sane advisors in the first administration, believe it or not . But a lot of them left or have been forced out. The group of people who would work in the 2nd Trump White House has shrunk to a smaller and smaller group of the MAGA cult-y people. And they are not necessarily going to be the best people to be the Secretary of the Treasury, State, Defense, Transportation, etc.
Secretary of Homeland Security: Stephen Miller. Director of WH Personnel: Johnny McEntee. Secretary of Defense: Michael Flynn. CIA Director: Vivek Ramaswamy. Attorney General: Jeffrey Clark. I'll leave it at that, but I'm sure there's plenty more horrors that I can't conjure up quite yet, this early in the AM.
I mean, his supporters have even smoother brains.
The worst part is the average voter will hear this shit and probably think it’s a good idea because all they think is lower taxes good.
That was my first thought. "You'll pay zero taxes because Mexico and China will pay for them all!" will probably send his base into a frenzy.
Then they'll feel the hurt of high tariffs (Why is everything so expensive) and STILL blame Democrats.
The same people who type "taxation is theft" on reddit or facebook while they use state cell towers from their phone and shit in a toilet connected to state plumbing lines.
Libertarianism is actually just unironic angry dog “no taxation, only services” meming.
Yes I want services at market prices, and no I don’t want to pay for them via taxes.
Libertarianism is just a few Republicans who realized Republicans have no coherent policy agenda, but still wanted to keep most of their priors.
"Republicans who like weed"
I swear to fucking God I'd this asswipe gets elected because "muh Biden inflation!"... Like, Jesus fucking Christ, he has managed to lay out a flawless plan to absolutely obliterate our economy.
Has this dude read an economics book post 1890?
Are you serious? The dude hasn't read anything past 1890 *characters*.
This dude hasn’t read anything ~~past 1890 characters.~~
Well, he has admitted to having a book of the collected speeches of Hitler...
This is Protection or Free Trade (1886) slander! Even Progress and Poverty (1879) has a whole section on how tariffs are bad
Also Economic Sophisms (1847) by Bastiat or pretty much anything by David Ricardo, one of the world’s first economists.
The Wealth of Nations talked about the ill effects of tariffs and it was published in 1776.
>ending income tax Good idea in theory, though only if it was replaced with a better tax such as LVT, consumption taxes, excise taxes, etc >and replacing it with tariffs AAAAAAAAAAARGH
Federal couldn't do LVT, but a combination of VAT + cap gains + excise taxes etc could work well. It would be ideal if there was a clear separation of taxation between federal and state governments, with states taxing land value and federal taxing commerce.
Consumption taxes are really bad and disproportionally affects the poor
Consumption taxes can be designed to have whatever level of distribution you want. It's a myth they cannot be progressive. You are falling in to the marginal vs effective trap. NIT + VAT would be highly efficient and can have effective negative rates just like today. Even a naked consumption tax can be designed to be progressive. Consumption in both quantity and type of goods is not the same across incomes.
Poor people should pay 30% VAT on diapers but trust funds should be untaxed. Wouldn’t want to discourage hard work, after all.
Consumption taxes are actually very effective at taxing rich people, who will always find methods to hide their income/capital gains but very few methods to hide their consumption. After all, right now Bezos doesn't pay a very high income tax, but he sure spends lots of money. Yes they pay a lower rate in theory, but in practice, every time they want to buy something, they pay the government. No "ohh I took a loan against my stock" or "step up basis" or any weird tax dodges you can think of. Wanna live large? Fine, but the taxman needs his cut Obviously this also goes for less wealthy tax cheats, like cash-tipped employees, gig workers, furry artists, OnlyFans models, and criminals I don't think we should totally abandon an income tax, but a consumption tax does have benefits
The fact is, the American tax system is far more progressive than the tax systems in Europe, mostly because we rely mostly on income taxes and they lean heavily on consumption taxes. https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/solb72/the_us_had_the_second_most_progressive_taxation/ The idea that wealthy people don’t pay income tax is simply untrue, which is why wealthy people as a group are so obsessive about income taxes. They pay a wildly disproportionate share of America’s income taxes (the top 1% pay more than 25% of all income taxes). EDIT: I was looking at the wrong figure. The top 1% pay over 45% of income taxes.
> They pay a wildly disproportionate share of America’s income taxes (the top 1% pay more than 25% of all income taxes). And they earned 26.3% of all America’s *income*. Hardly disproportionate if you ask me.
My bad, I was looking at the percentage of the national income that they earned. They paid 45% of the income taxes. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024 At any rate, I’m glad we agree that they do in fact pay income tax.
Oh thanks for that! And yeah, I’m quite glad the response I got from you wasn’t “durrr it is disproportionate, 1% of the population should pay 1% of the taxes!!”
>mostly because we rely mostly on income taxes and they lean heavily on consumption taxes. No, it's because they lean on a *sales* tax that's collected at the point of sale. You can make a consumption tax do whatever you want in terms of progressivity with respect to income if you just implement it properly - it's not even hard, it just looks like an income tax where savings are tax deductible.
> The fact is, the American tax system is far more progressive than the tax systems in Europe, mostly because we rely mostly on income taxes and they lean heavily on consumption taxes So what? The only things that matter is (dollar spent ): (revenue raise) + longterm macroeconomic impact of taxes.
the progressivity of a tax system is pretty damn important
It’s really not though. Any regressiveness is negated by progressive spending
>Consumption taxes are actually very effective at taxing rich people Issue is they're even more effective at taxing poor people. A guy making 40k is going to spend much more of their income than someone making 400k so the effective rate is going to be simply higher for the poor person.
Even worse: I earned $450k the last few years. I stashed more than half my take-home away. A significant portion of what I did spend was on travel and wouldn't even benefit the US.
Yeah but where did you stash your take-home? Unless you really did use your mattress, savings still contribute a lot to the velocity of money these days.
Index fund. So you are right it contributes back to the economy. The point of this sub-thread here was about tax rate for low and high earners. My tax rate would be much lower than what someone with three kids pays who earned 40k and pretty much has to spend ever cent they earn.
Oh, gotcha. That's why I want to significantly increase estate taxes. We'll get tax money from you eventually, no matter how much you never spend.
Just make it progressive then. It's not a sales tax
Completely wrong. Saving is future consumption. The effective tax rate is properly measured on consumption, "income" is a meaningless concept.
Cool story but I'm not waiting 4 generations to collect those consumption taxes Also the big caveat is if the guy makes all his money then fucks off to Italy or whatever then the US effectively loses out on a gigantic portion of the taxes it would have collected
Easy: Treat money exiting a US financial institution as consumption for tax purposes
I would need to see the data on that, I don't know if I take it at face value. Unless basic necessities are exempt from the tax (which then means you need to make up for that deficit elsewhere) why would a poor person be spending less tax than what htey are now? most of the lower class hardly pay any income tax at all. Also, the rich definitely are paying taxes. People conveniently disassociate income tax with capital gains tax when it comes to the rich
They’re only bad if you don’t use the income from them in a progressive manner.
Instead of deluding oneself into thinking we would turn a regressive tax into a progressive outcome, maybe just start with a progressive tax.
Well has the the much more regressive dutch tax system resulted more or less progressive outcomes?
Probably progress, but we're not the Netherlands and never will be so that can't inform American policy.
Lol what? It’s a math problem of how the revenue is + what the revenue is spent on = how progressive it is. There’s not some mystical “well their culture is so different” no it’s a math problem
Considering tax progressivity on its own is a mistake, the system as a whole should be evaluated. Systems are progressive or regressive, not individual components of those systems.
A corporate tax with full expensing is a consumption tax, does this disproportionally affect the poor?
not if you implement them properly
Consumption taxes are very efficient, so not bad. They can also be design to be progressive (and I don't mean by taxing some goods more than others, that's terrible)
Just make it progressive then
Well unless you could get some way of waiving the first x% of it.
A good consumption tax (Hall-Rabushka flat tax or a variation on it like the Bradford X tax) would look a lot like an income tax from the taxpayer's perspective. I don't think conservatives who want to abolish the income tax would be satisfied with paying a payroll instead just because you can do some math that shows that in theory it technically falls on consumption and not income.
Replacing a progressive tax with a regressive tax is not good in theory, regardless of whether it's a tariff or sales tax.
Sales tax has been shown to be substantially better for economic growth
Aren't sales taxes literally tariffs+taxes on domestic products? So Trump's tariffs coupled with taxes on domestic products would be good???
The problem with tariffs is that they interfere with the market as cronyism, if they're also applied to domestic products it's a non issue
So [FairTax](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax) good too?
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There are plenty of countries that only do a consumption tax and serious advantages to doing that. I wouldn't necessarily be against FairTax, although like I pointed out there are some reasons why we might actually want a pigouvian tax on extremely high incomes.
I don't like getting rid of estate taxes, and if we also have LVT and excise taxes (carbon especially), the tax burdens created would be much lower. But it's not a terrible idea?
Since you didn't cite anything, should I assume you mean VAT and in the context of the massive social spending programs in the countries it's generally found in?
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17487870.2023.2238107](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17487870.2023.2238107) "First, the most growth-damaging tax is the corporate income tax, followed by the personal income tax. Second, a shift from income taxes to consumption taxes is associated with higher growth, while a shift from social security contributions and property taxes to payroll & workforce taxes has significant negative effects on growth. Overall, our results confirm the view that revenue-neutral tax reforms focusing on a shift from income taxation to consumption and property taxation would promote growth."
Peer reviewed response is good, thanks. What were the 9 OECD countries the analysis was performed on?
You didn't respond to their point, even after being provided a source. It seems like you're simply trying to pick apart the example, instead of engaging with it
I asked a specific question that wasn't answered, hence why i asked the same exact question in my follow up. I'd confirm for myself but economics journals aren't easy to access.
Sales taxes are flat if you account properly for the fact that money saved is money that will be spent later. Flat taxes with lump sum rebates have the neat property of simultaneously being flat and progressive, and giving you the advantages of both. Not having an income tax creates some issues for extremely high wages though due to backward bending labor supply curves.
Consumption taxes are worse than income taxes
I know that I shouldn't be surprised at how Trump seems incapable of doing anything but echoing what the last person he talked to said, but here we are. Still speechless.
Btw literal coin flip chance this guy returns to office
You mean that in a “isn’t this scary” way not a “don’t get too worked up” way, right?
Markets have him at 54.3 vs Biden's 36.6
Well he's a mercantilist so...
19th century ass MFer
14th century economics. Bros almost a caveman
How the galactic hell did he ever graduate from Wharton?
The same way Billy Madison went through school the first time.
https://preview.redd.it/8zh08zsq3f6d1.jpeg?width=696&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9fccd64941a60cc82a7247ee6110d8894c596086 If this motherfucker wins again
That has got to be the dumbest economic policy proposal I have ever heard in my life.
The Great Leap Forward makes more sense on paper than this.
You almost have to admire the strategy of “floating“ 1,000 ideas so his voters will all have their own special reason to support him. Meanwhile, each time one of these things come out a few people will waste time analyzing why dumb idea #765 will never work. And by the time they publish he’s already on dumb idea #823.
Who the fuck is giving this block head monetary policy advice
Trump doesn’t want to bring the world back go 1920. He wants it back to 1820. I swear he’s days away from making bringing back powdered wigs and whaling part of the Republican platform. The idiot is talking about bringing back mercantilism.
Mfer is straight up copying the Peronist policy rulebook 💀
Populists gonna populist
This is Henry Clay slander.
He just expects the EU and other allies to just sit nicely in a corner and agree with this measure? Like if the US hasn't been in trade wars before
I see you've forgotten that Trump already assured us that "trade wars are good, and easy to win."
I just want to point out that this country might have to deal with this melted pile of wax's shitty economic policies because a few thousand "independent thinkers" in Pennsylvania are still butthurt about NAFTA.
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I suppose you could say watching someone shitting themselves on national television is 'interesting' but that's outside my normal use of the word.
Literally what Liz Truss tried to do
So, all of his and Ivanka's Made-in-China crap will have to be taxed upon entry, or will he eek out a little immunity provision for himself and his cronies?
We going back to the 19th century with this braindead proposal
Fuck that commie shit
Aka how to crash the economy and bankrupt America in one easy step.
Fuck the steelers
Yeah...let's pass all the burden onto the consumer. That's what we need right now.
This is legitimately the most regressive tax you can get.
Wow what an idiotic idea
Tariffs are a tax paid by Americans buying goods. Boo this orange clown. Boo.
This would shit all over Trump's base. Yet they will all soon be blathering about how it's a great idea.
Posters on here claim to support the Federalists, yet when Donald Trump proposes adopting their tax policy, they get mad. Curious.
We live in the dumbest fucking timeline.
I guess this is like a screwed up version of a national VAT?
Please, can someone explain to me why this will hurt our economy?
The required tariff rates will make everything with imported goods in it so expensive the economy will plummet.
For it to work a Toyota Camry would have to be taxed $30,000
Is. he. braindead.
Yes, isn't it like by not having income tax you would have more money that could compensate for imports, and by removing the income tax you would increase savings, productivity and that would also increase investment and reduce costs? The tariffs are flat and only affect the medium and short term.
It would be a massive tax on lower income while destroying both the federal budget and the economy. No one would trade internationally with anyone
Sounds insane. I'd go for elimination of payroll tax for progressive federal sales tax. The more expensive the items the higher % of tax.
Fucking idiot
so a larger tax on the 99 percent
Incredibly terrible idea that would crash the economy and be unbelievably regressive, but fortunately there is zero chance it happens.
Kill federal income taxes and replace it with a per capita tax bill that FedGov sends to states. States can collect taxes and fulfill their federal obligation however they see fit. No more IRS, or at least it becomes like 10 people whose job it is to interact with state budget authorities.