01-04-2017, 02:29 AM
(01-04-2017, 12:57 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-04-2017, 12:56 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(01-04-2017, 12:41 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-04-2017, 12:19 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(01-03-2017, 11:44 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: So - a shift to sales taxes instead of income taxes then?
Sales taxes are regressive, and they are tolerated to the extent that they do obvious services (like schools, medical care, roads, law enforcement). Because most people get little tangible benefit from federal government (like the huge military expenditures for defending American corporate interests abroad, the feds must rely heavily upon income taxes.
If you want to tax the robots, though, income taxes won't do it, since robots have no income.
The owners typically extract the income. To tax consumption is shakier. Taxing the conspicuous consumption of elites is far trickier than taxing income.
Taxing the income of the elites is virtually impossible, though. Buffett pays an effective tax rate of less than one tenth of one percent.
He's a buy-and-hold investor slow to cash out on his gains. The Feds tax people when they take gains. A billionaire living a middle-class existence (thus no gold toilets) isn't cashing out much. Berkshire-Hathaway stock has extremely low payouts of dividends.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.