It's my website, and I allow or disallow you to see my content. Just like I allow or disallow people to enter my house. Why should things be different when you are Hulu, NBC or anybody/anything else? Within the bounds of law anybody has a right to discriminate.
This is missing the point. Who cares what they have a legal right to do? A billionaire has the legal right to buy up all the farmland in Africa and salt the ground so nothing will grow. That doesn't mean people can't express their displeasure, refrain from doing business with that person or advocate changing the law so that they don't have that legal right anymore.
Run the numbers for Fair Tax over a longer term period. It continues to shift wealth to the wealthy, further increasing the income disparity between classes in our nation. The bottom line is that money makes more money, and the only way to stabilize disparity is to raise taxes on those with more money. I'd be happy if we could keep the ratio of class wealth consistent, instead of watching the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I think you'll find that this is impossible. Richie Rich has a billion dollars and makes 20 times more interest in a year than he spends. His net worth goes up over time unless you tax him at over 95%, and if you do anything even resembling that, he moves to a country with a lower tax rate. Joe Sixpack makes $35,000/year and spends all of his after tax income, regardless of whether his tax rate is 100% or -100%.
The trouble with class warfare is that it isn't really a war. Poor people are never going to have as much money as rich people short of some communist utopia. The goal should be to benefit everyone, not some poorly planned "redistribution of wealth" zero-sum game. Measures aimed at punishing rich people rarely do anything other than screw over the middle class (see also: Alternative Minimum Tax not indexed for inflation) and thereby push more of the middle class into the ranks of the poor instead of the opposite.
If you think income tax is fair, you simply don't understand how it works. Even if your tax rate is zero - say you earn $5000 a year - your $5000 is still taxed at the average rate. For instance, if the plumber is paying 35%, and you pay some of your supposedly non-taxed $5000 to the plumber to fix your leak, 35% of what you gave him goes right to the government; this increases your cost of service by about 1.5 times. In other words, you actually paid the plumber $65, and of course, that's as much, or more, than the service you got, and you paid the government $35; every transaction you make with your $5000 will be hit with the "hidden" income tax applied to whomever you paid it to, and you will get that much less service, goods, etc. In the end, you pay about the average rate.
How is that different with the sales tax? What difference does it make if the plumber pays $35 in income tax on the earnings vs. paying $35 in sales tax on the things that he buys with the money? In each case he gets $65 worth of value by charging you $100 and paying $35 in tax.
So this brings the question of indirection. A corporation can spend money from its treasury to buy an ad that says "Sony Pictures Corporation supports Sonny Bono for Congress" or whatever. The problem comes when Sony gives money to "The Campaign for Permanent Copyright" and they're the ones who put their name at the bottom of the advertising.
And we can't just get rid of organizations like that, because individuals need them to pool resources.
But what we can do is to say that corporations don't need them. Corporations are already pooled resources. So let's ban multi-level indirection: An individual can provide money to an organization for political purposes, but an organization can't. Organizations can still spend money for political purposes, they just have to do it in their own name. And punish directing corporate money to any other organization for political purposes as money laundering.
If you're feeling kind to the corporations, we can also create an allowance for donating corporate money to another organization for political purposes if the donor has its name listed in every subsequent publication made by the donee and anyone the donee provides money to. (This would be brilliant for political campaign "organizations": "Paid for by the committee to elect George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, sponsored by Halliburton.")
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It's my website, and I allow or disallow you to see my content. Just like I allow or disallow people to enter my house. Why should things be different when you are Hulu, NBC or anybody/anything else? Within the bounds of law anybody has a right to discriminate.
This is missing the point. Who cares what they have a legal right to do? A billionaire has the legal right to buy up all the farmland in Africa and salt the ground so nothing will grow. That doesn't mean people can't express their displeasure, refrain from doing business with that person or advocate changing the law so that they don't have that legal right anymore.
Run the numbers for Fair Tax over a longer term period. It continues to shift wealth to the wealthy, further increasing the income disparity between classes in our nation. The bottom line is that money makes more money, and the only way to stabilize disparity is to raise taxes on those with more money. I'd be happy if we could keep the ratio of class wealth consistent, instead of watching the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I think you'll find that this is impossible. Richie Rich has a billion dollars and makes 20 times more interest in a year than he spends. His net worth goes up over time unless you tax him at over 95%, and if you do anything even resembling that, he moves to a country with a lower tax rate. Joe Sixpack makes $35,000/year and spends all of his after tax income, regardless of whether his tax rate is 100% or -100%.
The trouble with class warfare is that it isn't really a war. Poor people are never going to have as much money as rich people short of some communist utopia. The goal should be to benefit everyone, not some poorly planned "redistribution of wealth" zero-sum game. Measures aimed at punishing rich people rarely do anything other than screw over the middle class (see also: Alternative Minimum Tax not indexed for inflation) and thereby push more of the middle class into the ranks of the poor instead of the opposite.
If you think income tax is fair, you simply don't understand how it works. Even if your tax rate is zero - say you earn $5000 a year - your $5000 is still taxed at the average rate. For instance, if the plumber is paying 35%, and you pay some of your supposedly non-taxed $5000 to the plumber to fix your leak, 35% of what you gave him goes right to the government; this increases your cost of service by about 1.5 times. In other words, you actually paid the plumber $65, and of course, that's as much, or more, than the service you got, and you paid the government $35; every transaction you make with your $5000 will be hit with the "hidden" income tax applied to whomever you paid it to, and you will get that much less service, goods, etc. In the end, you pay about the average rate.
How is that different with the sales tax? What difference does it make if the plumber pays $35 in income tax on the earnings vs. paying $35 in sales tax on the things that he buys with the money? In each case he gets $65 worth of value by charging you $100 and paying $35 in tax.
So this brings the question of indirection. A corporation can spend money from its treasury to buy an ad that says "Sony Pictures Corporation supports Sonny Bono for Congress" or whatever. The problem comes when Sony gives money to "The Campaign for Permanent Copyright" and they're the ones who put their name at the bottom of the advertising.
And we can't just get rid of organizations like that, because individuals need them to pool resources.
But what we can do is to say that corporations don't need them. Corporations are already pooled resources. So let's ban multi-level indirection: An individual can provide money to an organization for political purposes, but an organization can't. Organizations can still spend money for political purposes, they just have to do it in their own name. And punish directing corporate money to any other organization for political purposes as money laundering.
If you're feeling kind to the corporations, we can also create an allowance for donating corporate money to another organization for political purposes if the donor has its name listed in every subsequent publication made by the donee and anyone the donee provides money to. (This would be brilliant for political campaign "organizations": "Paid for by the committee to elect George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, sponsored by Halliburton.")