Imposing a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and over $500,000 for single taxpayers. That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue over five years;
Raise the surtax? Lower the Income Level at which the surtax kicks in? Flat tax on all income? (Note: that would hurt the poor and Middle Class badly.) Progressive tax? Forget the time limitation? National Sales Tax in some form? (Again, that would most affect, unless 'glossed' in some manner, mostly the poor and Middle Class.)
Something else?
Oh, and confiscatory inheritance taxes.
And ban billionaires. Well, ban €-billionaires. $-billionaires may soon be thirteen to the dozen.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
However, if we're talking about a flat tax, my own preference would be to tax the means of production: They don't move around too much, they're hard to hide on the Cayman Islands, and no amount of cooking the books can obfuscate them.
Plus, it gives a simple and effective means to stop tax cheats: If nobody pays property tax on a factory, that must mean that nobody wants to claim ownership, and the factory thus belongs to the government. That way, the state gets its taxes and the fatcats get to figure out among themselves who'll be paying them.
The value of each asset should be priced as the higher of the market value and the government auditors' assessment in order to dampen asset price bubbles.
I don't really care about Wall Street or their funny-money or their fancy paper. When the last chip hits the table, he who controls the productive assets wins.
Property taxes, here in the States, are levied by local and state authorities, for the most part. A Federal property tax on land, farms, factories, & etc held by US corporations outside the US is a really interesting idea. If dedicated to the same purposes as the local property taxes: education and infrastructure, it could get broad support.
At least I see a way of presenting a good case to the Public.
Of course, the result was the CIA acting as an enforcer for United Fruit in overthrowing the government. But in abstract, its a check on understating taxable property value that bears considering. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
The threat of nationalisation at compensation equivalent to the value declared for tax purposes is scary if and only if a) you systematically under-value your land in order to defraud the taxpayers AND b) there is a real need for land reform.
I am not sure that there is a real need for land reform in much of The West(TM). So we'd need an auditor corps to assess the property values.
The difficulty is that, cutlurally, people may be outraged by their greed, but they don't actually think it's wrong. To the winnner, the spoils. keep to the Fen Causeway
And Senator Obama is out spouting a "Tax cut for the poor and Middle Class."
To help solve the problem the Tax part of this needs to be revenue enhancing. Meaning some group is going to have to pay more. The obvious group are those who benefited by the Looting - in Frank Schnittger's apt wording. One way is by increasing the tax responsibility of individuals. Another is by increasing (i.e., making the bastards fork over) the tax responsibility of Corporations.
Even a flat tax on Corporations would raise a lot of money AND meet the "Fairness" qualification.
Oh, wait - we don't have any of those anyway. Carry on.
One other useful item on the list is repealing the law which gives corporations some of the same rights as individuals, with none of the democratic responsibilities.
Another useful item would be creating a completely new index of economic welfare - and I don't mean GDP, I mean the Dow, which has become the de facto measure of economic health.
Let's say Corporation A decides to reimport jobs from China. Workers in the US are much more expensive than Chinese workers, so its profits will take an instant hit.
If enough corporations do this the Dow will be hammered, because 'analysts' will 'punish' corporations which are 'uncompetitive.'
With an alternative index based on populist economics - most usefully median disposable income - you can say neener neener neener to the Dow. As long as investment is still happening - which could be a useful metric for a companion index - it can crash and no one needs to care.
But oh, the hue and cry that would go up :-P
Or, you could simply restrict the granting of corporate personhood in meaningful ways, or that corporate persons be tasked with activities other than maximum shareholder return.
But overturning it would require a quite different court than the one we have now. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
the rack will help get the offshore bank account passwords.
but no waterboarding, we don't do that... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
