People who are living close enough to levels where there are no luxuries shouldn't pay taxes. That's fair. Taxes on luxury levels of wealth make sense. Taxes on necessities don't.
Probably about half of us would not have been much bothered if she had fallen out of the gene pool. Stupid people who can't take responsibility for their actions, even if they're given bad advice from a machine, are not the kind of people that'll see much sympathy from/.
Why should we want the government to lose its mechanisms for policy-based tax code? Also, I don't know about you, but when I hear "most libertarian", my initial reaction is extremely negative.
What I really want is to shift the paperwork to where it belongs, with the accountants and bureaucrats. That's one of the things we pay taxes for. They already get a copy of W-2s and bank statements. They should be doing the math and send a bill or check.
I agree entirely. However, every time someone has proposed this and pointed at the other countries that do this and do it well), the tax prep companies scream about unfair competition and conservatives worry about growth of government power.
The Europeans I know often find American politics perplexing - more than once I've heard that we're making things a lot harder than they need to be. Explaining American political traditions and paranoias is something I've had to do many times..
It is fair for each. Our tax system, for each person, taxes mainly levels of wealth that amount to luxury, leaving the levels of wealth that allow less luxury less, and ideally hitting zero a bit before one reaches the absolute necessities of wealth.
It applies to everyine, it's just that the poor have less luxury wealth to tax. That's fair.
Fairness is not as simple as "the same thing" for everyone when not everyone has equal financial resources. If fairness were the same as equality, we'd literally pay everyone the same thing.
If you look at how employment works in our society, our tax system fits into it in that we try not to let taxes get in between people and their necessities; we place the tax burden on the wealthy because beyond a certain level they don't need their wealth as much as the poor - what might be yet another vacation to Europe to them might amount to healthy food or living someplace without rats to poor people. In a capitalist system, we may not be able to redress the fact that resources are being used badly, but we at least can avoid having our tax system make the problem worse.
It's also important that we don't make it a zero-tax to full-tax transition without gradation - for people with income similar to mine (mid 5-figures, no debt, no kids yet), I suspect I'd fall under that limit and pay no taxes in most proposals. That's a bad deal because there's a lot of people like me who vote, and it's important that we bear some of the tax burden so we're not tempted to vote for irresponsible spending. It may not be desirable for the poor to pay taxes, but keeping people like me in the loop is important - paying taxes is both a civic duty and something that suggests an involvement in keeping it responsible. I would happily have us pay more taxes if we got significant benefit from it. Sometimes this is directly to my benefit (e.g. if I paid $150 more in taxes a year for fully subsidised public transit, and saved $800 in fare), sometimes just to society.
So it looks like we're both in posession of the facts - that doesn't usually happen in discussions and I've learned that I can't assume it in a dicussion (IRL or online). I am aware of the modern problems you mention, I just maintain that we're better off than we were, and that compared to many other nations, were're doing quite well. Our only real competitors on that front are, IMO, western europe and Australia, not our own past.
My impression is that the "out of control" phrase is usually uttered by libertarians (or at least conservatives) who want to tear down society in a return to an idealised past that's distant from the real one. If you're just contending that we're differently bad, I probably don't disagree with you except in overall comparison. To me, a return to either the real past or the particular imagined one I've heard so much about would be a move to a world that's much worse. Provided we're not using backwards-looking phrases or methods, I'm open to changes that look like they'd bring benefit to society. I'm not so bothered by government coercion when it serves a good purpose - when it does not, I am open to adjustments (several of the topics you mentioned are areas where I'd also like to see change).
I'm happy to see phrases like History is something to contemplate calmly, and from a distance - I comment on Politico reasonably often, and while I occasionally articulate my own positions (a liberal/academic flavour of socialism), more of the time I try to either provide historical context to news stories there or criticise a lot of the knee-jerk responses on the stories there. I'm glad to have reasoned and intelligent discussions on these topics, so it's cool to have people like you around.
If you were actually in the same town as me, I'd invite you out to tea to discuss these things further - unfortunately it's a bit of a PITA to discuss these things at length in a forum. If there are some topics you really want to discuss further where you think we actually disagree (or you're curious if we do), let me know - right now, as far as I can tell, all we disagree on are possibly the overall evaluation/meaning of "out of control", and possibly a disagreement on government coercion.
We have their document, and we place a lesser reliance on their writings at the time, but we're not here to worship them. They're one of the few people who (mostly the same people, anyhow) got a second try after botching one go at a government. Them being dead now, it's ours to keep changing or abandon at our pleasure. We only really need to know or care what they thought, beyond the document, to give us context to interpret it (along with the rest of common law which provides more context).
Why would we care what the founders thought about governmental theory? We have their original system, and we've continued to evolve it just as all governments across the world continue to evolve. Should a Frenchperson care whether the Napoleonic code they use in modern times would be approved of by those that made the original?
Remember that the idea of centralisation of power was something they got very wrong from the start, and the reason the constitution was written was to try to fix some of the problems of the disasterous first government. There was a lot of discussion on the topic back then with a lot of debate - the founders were not of one mind. We're probably much closer to John Adams' vision for government, but closer to Thomas Jefferson's vision for society. On this issue, I think we should stay with Adams and try to gently reign in our Jeffersonian social tendencies (I know it's a loose analogy and the bits don't like up perfectly - if you're interested in history, no need to make that point).
There are no gods. It is, however, a legitimate role of government to structure activity and rewards. I am not proposing (nor does our current system enact) a formula where everything beyond necessities is taken. The gradated tax system doesn't work that way.
If he lived in a vaccuum, and if all money came from the same job, and if people had all their basic needs met, you might have a point. The thing is, society has worthwhile programs, it needs money, and person A and person B have different levels of their income spent on necessity versus luxury.
If you want to think about it moralistically, I'll phrase it that way (although I don't think of it this way internally): The idea of tax is to have useful programs, guarantees, and protections while harming the interests of people the least. Tax policy should be structured in a way so as to burden people's luxury desires rather than their necessity desires, because the basics for life are more important than what is required for a reasonable living standard, which in turn is more important than what is required for a luxurious living standard. To minimise the harm of tax, we choose varying levels of tax based on income.
I'm not sure if your alternative posited here is quite just - it has two problems that I see. First, it has the effect of benefitting the very wealthy (those in the upper part of those above the deduction) at the cost of the mid-wealthy. Having multiple grades is in my opinion a better alignment of duty to necessity. Second, it alienates those who can afford to support *some* of the nation's programs from the costs of those programs, which might lead to strange political effects. I like the multiple tax bracket idea (with no taxes for the lowest bracket) and progressively stronger brackets (or possibly a smooth gradient?) better for that reason.
Capital investment is a good thing, although I'm not sure the wealthy are the most qualified to efficiently invest those resources. A lot of what the wealthy spend is not investment by any means, and much of it is wasteful. I come from a wealthy family, and I know that society would've been better off had some of the splurges instead gone to better the educational system for those less well-off.
Our government is based on a mix of principle, haggling, and constrained improvisation. It's impossible to justify it in any reasonable sense - those taxes you mention sometimes were done to placate a particular interest group, sometimes to constrain people who were trying to cheat the system, sometimes because taxing in another way would've been politically or legally difficult (in-system logic), or to discourage certain activities. I wouldn't call our government principled, but I think it still generally works ok (even if we can do better).
I'm not patriotic. I'm simply aware of the benefits that we get from that government, from the slow improvements we've steadily made in the nation since its founding (it was actually initially much worse). If you put the collection of problems you mention (many but not all of which I agree are problems) on a scale with the problems of what the US was at almost any point in the past, you'll find that we're not actually that bad off. Even if we discard the entirely dysfunctional first government(s) the US had between the Brits and the Constitution, you'll find even our earliest forms of government to be hopelessly corrupt, not comitted to modern notions of equality, fairness, or civility. Slavery's too easy an example - look at the Alien and Sedition Acts in context, where the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalist parties were using every excuse they could to stifle each other's criticisms, mass-arrest each other, and bludgeon their way to control of the nation. I happen to otherwise admire John Adams, but his behaviour (and Federalist behaviour in general) in struggle with Jefferson brought the US as close as it ever came to the witchhunts of the Reign of Terror in France (McCarthy in the 50s may be similar in some ways too).
Likewise, under any regime, no matter how friendly, there will always be someone who claims it is out of control.
The point of counterasserting it using the same words is to note the subjectivity of the phrasing - it's too easy to simply sop it up without thinking about it. Who says we have an out-of-control governmnent? Why? What do they mean by that? Is it a statement of fact or a slogan? Can they back it up? Are they just indicating that they're not getting their way?
My answer actually *is* that things are *not* out of control, that they're mostly the way they've been for a very long time, and that while we can certainly do better, things are not terrible now.
If we wanted to simplify the tax code, we could (provided politics don't get in the way - alas, they always do). It's really more the wrangling over that that produces complexity than anything else, and we'd see similar wrangling in any attempt to change the system towards what you want. Simplicity is not the only thing worthwhile in a tax system anyhow - I'd like it if it came without cost to other social priorities, but basically all the flat tax systems (income based or spending based) eliminate social priorities that are important to me.
Take it for granted that if it means giving a big tax break to the wealthy and any tax hike at all to the poor, I will oppose it.
Paying taxes is something one might view as punishment, or something one might view as duty. I think it's a duty of those who have excess to pay more taxes to support the public good. The goal is not to have them cease economic activity that (at least theoretically) is in the public interest, it is a simple recognition that excess wealth is less necessary for people's happiness and well-being than funds needed to get by. To the extent that wealth is success, I would say that they have a higher obligation, but it's not punitive in nature.
It's not arbitrary when someone spends 60% of their income on basic food and apartment rental and they pay at a far lower tax rate than someone who is very rich who is very far from need. Government policy has always aimed at some form of the public good, from when the founding fathers decided that mail rates for political journals would be based solely on their advertising (content would be subsidised because they believed that political discourse among those eligible to vote (white landowners, generally) was essential to the health of the nation) until modern times.
There will be politics, but that's no excuse to give up on a decent-but-messy system and replace it with a deficient-but-clean one. The actual results of your preferred policy would be to burden the poor and benefit the wealthy. It's more caring to tax excess than tax necessaries, and far less crippling to those at the bottom who are trying to get by or better themselves.
Quite possibly. Unfortunately, this is one of those laws that everyone ignores - most presidents from Regan to FDR have been involved in something like this, and there usually isn't even a scandal about it. Heck, with Reagan it was reported in newspapers and nobody made much about it.
It would be good to see tougher rules for what politicians can do like this moving forward though. I'm not too keen to see angry conservatives looking to regain face after being embarassed by widespread dislike of BushJr using this as a basis of a witchhunt, but it would be enormously healthy to see stricter ethics rules on political favours.
If there were a broad consensus from conservatives to liberals that we're ready to stop allowing this kind of thing, and that in the future we'll get involved whenever it occurs again, whether those involved are liberal or conservative, dems or repubs, then I'd be happy to support an investigation. If this amounts either to a standard that only democrats will ever be held to, or amounts to a witchhunt, I'll grudgingly accept the status quo and suggest we ignore it until there's a consensus to apply it fairly to everybody.
Except we don't have an out of control government. There are some problems, but there always are, and that's the cost of living in a civilized nation - there is a government, it will tax you, and sometimes through mistake or politics those taxes will go to useless or bad ends. If you don't like it, push for electoral reform. We do have the ability to elect government.
Certainly you can't just challenge the IRS in court and hope to win. If you want to tear down civilization, you have to convince a lot of people that the government is evil, and then convince them to stand by as you start ripping bits out and things start breaking. You've been saved from that consequence by people who understand the big picture of society and are willing to accept that an imperfect system is almost always better than one that doesn't do anything.
If you want to argue constitutionality, find a lawyer. I'm not one, and as far as I know your opinion on the constitution is in an extreme minority.
One way to reduce tax prep costs would be to have the state manage it all online - other countries do that and the sum private-public costs are much less. Every time it's tried, all the tax-prep companies cry bloody murder, but we should probably ignore them.
The hard/huge break distinction is based on the idea that income necessary for a decent quality of life is different than income amounting to luxury, and that it is more important to weigh government services against the first than against both of them together. Tax policy has long had this as an explicit assumption.
I wouldn't suggest any malice was involved. The manager who was arguing for the schedule to be pushed up was, as far as I know, one of those killed in the initial explosion.
I guess my original "questions" were full of hyperbole - it's just a shame when people cut corners in industry like this.
The very poor don't usually put a significant part of their income towards savings, while the very wealthy do. With an entirely spending-based tax system, the poor pay that tax on the majority of their income, while the wealthy pay it on relatively little.
It's more desirable that people earning very little pay no taxes, because that comes out of their necessities, while those with excess pay the taxes in proportion to what portion of their income is beyond what they need to survive. Progressive tax brackets meet this policy goal admirably, and have for a very long time.
Did they not honestly believe that a disaster could occur? Did the right people not talk to each other? Or was the urge to cut corners simply so great that people ignored the risk?
From the ABC interview with one of the survivors, the BP people were arguing with the Transocean people, insisting that it would be ok to skip some phases of sealing the well because they wanted to move the schedule up. I wonder what that BP manager was thinking.
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If it's truly and absolutely token (like $1 until it goes over some threshold), I probably wouldn't have a major issue with it.
People who are living close enough to levels where there are no luxuries shouldn't pay taxes. That's fair. Taxes on luxury levels of wealth make sense. Taxes on necessities don't.
Probably about half of us would not have been much bothered if she had fallen out of the gene pool. Stupid people who can't take responsibility for their actions, even if they're given bad advice from a machine, are not the kind of people that'll see much sympathy from /.
Why should we want the government to lose its mechanisms for policy-based tax code? Also, I don't know about you, but when I hear "most libertarian", my initial reaction is extremely negative.
What I really want is to shift the paperwork to where it belongs, with the accountants and bureaucrats. That's one of the things we pay taxes for. They already get a copy of W-2s and bank statements. They should be doing the math and send a bill or check.
I agree entirely. However, every time someone has proposed this and pointed at the other countries that do this and do it well), the tax prep companies scream about unfair competition and conservatives worry about growth of government power.
The Europeans I know often find American politics perplexing - more than once I've heard that we're making things a lot harder than they need to be. Explaining American political traditions and paranoias is something I've had to do many times..
It is fair for each. Our tax system, for each person, taxes mainly levels of wealth that amount to luxury, leaving the levels of wealth that allow less luxury less, and ideally hitting zero a bit before one reaches the absolute necessities of wealth.
It applies to everyine, it's just that the poor have less luxury wealth to tax. That's fair.
Fairness is not as simple as "the same thing" for everyone when not everyone has equal financial resources. If fairness were the same as equality, we'd literally pay everyone the same thing.
If you look at how employment works in our society, our tax system fits into it in that we try not to let taxes get in between people and their necessities; we place the tax burden on the wealthy because beyond a certain level they don't need their wealth as much as the poor - what might be yet another vacation to Europe to them might amount to healthy food or living someplace without rats to poor people. In a capitalist system, we may not be able to redress the fact that resources are being used badly, but we at least can avoid having our tax system make the problem worse.
It's also important that we don't make it a zero-tax to full-tax transition without gradation - for people with income similar to mine (mid 5-figures, no debt, no kids yet), I suspect I'd fall under that limit and pay no taxes in most proposals. That's a bad deal because there's a lot of people like me who vote, and it's important that we bear some of the tax burden so we're not tempted to vote for irresponsible spending. It may not be desirable for the poor to pay taxes, but keeping people like me in the loop is important - paying taxes is both a civic duty and something that suggests an involvement in keeping it responsible. I would happily have us pay more taxes if we got significant benefit from it. Sometimes this is directly to my benefit (e.g. if I paid $150 more in taxes a year for fully subsidised public transit, and saved $800 in fare), sometimes just to society.
So it looks like we're both in posession of the facts - that doesn't usually happen in discussions and I've learned that I can't assume it in a dicussion (IRL or online). I am aware of the modern problems you mention, I just maintain that we're better off than we were, and that compared to many other nations, were're doing quite well. Our only real competitors on that front are, IMO, western europe and Australia, not our own past.
My impression is that the "out of control" phrase is usually uttered by libertarians (or at least conservatives) who want to tear down society in a return to an idealised past that's distant from the real one. If you're just contending that we're differently bad, I probably don't disagree with you except in overall comparison. To me, a return to either the real past or the particular imagined one I've heard so much about would be a move to a world that's much worse. Provided we're not using backwards-looking phrases or methods, I'm open to changes that look like they'd bring benefit to society. I'm not so bothered by government coercion when it serves a good purpose - when it does not, I am open to adjustments (several of the topics you mentioned are areas where I'd also like to see change).
I'm happy to see phrases like History is something to contemplate calmly, and from a distance - I comment on Politico reasonably often, and while I occasionally articulate my own positions (a liberal/academic flavour of socialism), more of the time I try to either provide historical context to news stories there or criticise a lot of the knee-jerk responses on the stories there. I'm glad to have reasoned and intelligent discussions on these topics, so it's cool to have people like you around.
If you were actually in the same town as me, I'd invite you out to tea to discuss these things further - unfortunately it's a bit of a PITA to discuss these things at length in a forum. If there are some topics you really want to discuss further where you think we actually disagree (or you're curious if we do), let me know - right now, as far as I can tell, all we disagree on are possibly the overall evaluation/meaning of "out of control", and possibly a disagreement on government coercion.
Best wishes
We have their document, and we place a lesser reliance on their writings at the time, but we're not here to worship them. They're one of the few people who (mostly the same people, anyhow) got a second try after botching one go at a government. Them being dead now, it's ours to keep changing or abandon at our pleasure. We only really need to know or care what they thought, beyond the document, to give us context to interpret it (along with the rest of common law which provides more context).
Why would we care what the founders thought about governmental theory? We have their original system, and we've continued to evolve it just as all governments across the world continue to evolve. Should a Frenchperson care whether the Napoleonic code they use in modern times would be approved of by those that made the original?
Remember that the idea of centralisation of power was something they got very wrong from the start, and the reason the constitution was written was to try to fix some of the problems of the disasterous first government. There was a lot of discussion on the topic back then with a lot of debate - the founders were not of one mind. We're probably much closer to John Adams' vision for government, but closer to Thomas Jefferson's vision for society. On this issue, I think we should stay with Adams and try to gently reign in our Jeffersonian social tendencies (I know it's a loose analogy and the bits don't like up perfectly - if you're interested in history, no need to make that point).
So is social justice! Anything but the prosperity gospel and conservapedia is slavery and is therefore against the founding fathers!!!!1!
There are no gods. It is, however, a legitimate role of government to structure activity and rewards. I am not proposing (nor does our current system enact) a formula where everything beyond necessities is taken. The gradated tax system doesn't work that way.
If he lived in a vaccuum, and if all money came from the same job, and if people had all their basic needs met, you might have a point. The thing is, society has worthwhile programs, it needs money, and person A and person B have different levels of their income spent on necessity versus luxury.
If you want to think about it moralistically, I'll phrase it that way (although I don't think of it this way internally): The idea of tax is to have useful programs, guarantees, and protections while harming the interests of people the least. Tax policy should be structured in a way so as to burden people's luxury desires rather than their necessity desires, because the basics for life are more important than what is required for a reasonable living standard, which in turn is more important than what is required for a luxurious living standard. To minimise the harm of tax, we choose varying levels of tax based on income.
I'm not sure if your alternative posited here is quite just - it has two problems that I see. First, it has the effect of benefitting the very wealthy (those in the upper part of those above the deduction) at the cost of the mid-wealthy. Having multiple grades is in my opinion a better alignment of duty to necessity. Second, it alienates those who can afford to support *some* of the nation's programs from the costs of those programs, which might lead to strange political effects. I like the multiple tax bracket idea (with no taxes for the lowest bracket) and progressively stronger brackets (or possibly a smooth gradient?) better for that reason.
Capital investment is a good thing, although I'm not sure the wealthy are the most qualified to efficiently invest those resources. A lot of what the wealthy spend is not investment by any means, and much of it is wasteful. I come from a wealthy family, and I know that society would've been better off had some of the splurges instead gone to better the educational system for those less well-off.
Our government is based on a mix of principle, haggling, and constrained improvisation. It's impossible to justify it in any reasonable sense - those taxes you mention sometimes were done to placate a particular interest group, sometimes to constrain people who were trying to cheat the system, sometimes because taxing in another way would've been politically or legally difficult (in-system logic), or to discourage certain activities. I wouldn't call our government principled, but I think it still generally works ok (even if we can do better).
I'm not patriotic. I'm simply aware of the benefits that we get from that government, from the slow improvements we've steadily made in the nation since its founding (it was actually initially much worse). If you put the collection of problems you mention (many but not all of which I agree are problems) on a scale with the problems of what the US was at almost any point in the past, you'll find that we're not actually that bad off. Even if we discard the entirely dysfunctional first government(s) the US had between the Brits and the Constitution, you'll find even our earliest forms of government to be hopelessly corrupt, not comitted to modern notions of equality, fairness, or civility. Slavery's too easy an example - look at the Alien and Sedition Acts in context, where the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalist parties were using every excuse they could to stifle each other's criticisms, mass-arrest each other, and bludgeon their way to control of the nation. I happen to otherwise admire John Adams, but his behaviour (and Federalist behaviour in general) in struggle with Jefferson brought the US as close as it ever came to the witchhunts of the Reign of Terror in France (McCarthy in the 50s may be similar in some ways too).
Likewise, under any regime, no matter how friendly, there will always be someone who claims it is out of control.
The point of counterasserting it using the same words is to note the subjectivity of the phrasing - it's too easy to simply sop it up without thinking about it. Who says we have an out-of-control governmnent? Why? What do they mean by that? Is it a statement of fact or a slogan? Can they back it up? Are they just indicating that they're not getting their way?
My answer actually *is* that things are *not* out of control, that they're mostly the way they've been for a very long time, and that while we can certainly do better, things are not terrible now.
If we wanted to simplify the tax code, we could (provided politics don't get in the way - alas, they always do). It's really more the wrangling over that that produces complexity than anything else, and we'd see similar wrangling in any attempt to change the system towards what you want. Simplicity is not the only thing worthwhile in a tax system anyhow - I'd like it if it came without cost to other social priorities, but basically all the flat tax systems (income based or spending based) eliminate social priorities that are important to me.
Take it for granted that if it means giving a big tax break to the wealthy and any tax hike at all to the poor, I will oppose it.
Paying taxes is something one might view as punishment, or something one might view as duty. I think it's a duty of those who have excess to pay more taxes to support the public good. The goal is not to have them cease economic activity that (at least theoretically) is in the public interest, it is a simple recognition that excess wealth is less necessary for people's happiness and well-being than funds needed to get by. To the extent that wealth is success, I would say that they have a higher obligation, but it's not punitive in nature.
What does Sestak have to do with tax policy and government size anyway?
It's not arbitrary when someone spends 60% of their income on basic food and apartment rental and they pay at a far lower tax rate than someone who is very rich who is very far from need. Government policy has always aimed at some form of the public good, from when the founding fathers decided that mail rates for political journals would be based solely on their advertising (content would be subsidised because they believed that political discourse among those eligible to vote (white landowners, generally) was essential to the health of the nation) until modern times.
There will be politics, but that's no excuse to give up on a decent-but-messy system and replace it with a deficient-but-clean one. The actual results of your preferred policy would be to burden the poor and benefit the wealthy. It's more caring to tax excess than tax necessaries, and far less crippling to those at the bottom who are trying to get by or better themselves.
Quite possibly. Unfortunately, this is one of those laws that everyone ignores - most presidents from Regan to FDR have been involved in something like this, and there usually isn't even a scandal about it. Heck, with Reagan it was reported in newspapers and nobody made much about it.
It would be good to see tougher rules for what politicians can do like this moving forward though. I'm not too keen to see angry conservatives looking to regain face after being embarassed by widespread dislike of BushJr using this as a basis of a witchhunt, but it would be enormously healthy to see stricter ethics rules on political favours.
If there were a broad consensus from conservatives to liberals that we're ready to stop allowing this kind of thing, and that in the future we'll get involved whenever it occurs again, whether those involved are liberal or conservative, dems or repubs, then I'd be happy to support an investigation. If this amounts either to a standard that only democrats will ever be held to, or amounts to a witchhunt, I'll grudgingly accept the status quo and suggest we ignore it until there's a consensus to apply it fairly to everybody.
Except we don't have an out of control government. There are some problems, but there always are, and that's the cost of living in a civilized nation - there is a government, it will tax you, and sometimes through mistake or politics those taxes will go to useless or bad ends. If you don't like it, push for electoral reform. We do have the ability to elect government.
Certainly you can't just challenge the IRS in court and hope to win. If you want to tear down civilization, you have to convince a lot of people that the government is evil, and then convince them to stand by as you start ripping bits out and things start breaking. You've been saved from that consequence by people who understand the big picture of society and are willing to accept that an imperfect system is almost always better than one that doesn't do anything.
If you want to argue constitutionality, find a lawyer. I'm not one, and as far as I know your opinion on the constitution is in an extreme minority.
One way to reduce tax prep costs would be to have the state manage it all online - other countries do that and the sum private-public costs are much less. Every time it's tried, all the tax-prep companies cry bloody murder, but we should probably ignore them.
The hard/huge break distinction is based on the idea that income necessary for a decent quality of life is different than income amounting to luxury, and that it is more important to weigh government services against the first than against both of them together. Tax policy has long had this as an explicit assumption.
I wouldn't suggest any malice was involved. The manager who was arguing for the schedule to be pushed up was, as far as I know, one of those killed in the initial explosion.
I guess my original "questions" were full of hyperbole - it's just a shame when people cut corners in industry like this.
The very poor don't usually put a significant part of their income towards savings, while the very wealthy do. With an entirely spending-based tax system, the poor pay that tax on the majority of their income, while the wealthy pay it on relatively little.
It's more desirable that people earning very little pay no taxes, because that comes out of their necessities, while those with excess pay the taxes in proportion to what portion of their income is beyond what they need to survive. Progressive tax brackets meet this policy goal admirably, and have for a very long time.
Did they not honestly believe that a disaster could occur? Did the right people not talk to each other? Or was the urge to cut corners simply so great that people ignored the risk?
From the ABC interview with one of the survivors, the BP people were arguing with the Transocean people, insisting that it would be ok to skip some phases of sealing the well because they wanted to move the schedule up. I wonder what that BP manager was thinking.
Flat taxes are disproportionately hard on low-income earners, while they give the wealthy a huge break. They're not fair, stop pushing them.