Consumptin punishes the poor improportionately to their means.

That is to say a greater portion of the poor's wealth goes towards necessary consumption (food, clothes, etc). Whereas the super wealthy use a fraction of their wealth on such things. There is a reason every other western nation uses a graduated bracket tax system. I'm not counting Russia as western because, like Kazakhistan, a majority of their nation is in Asia.

boner, you should really count russia as part of europe, why?

because almost all ethnic russians in russia lives in the european part

the russian federation is divided into two main parts, russia, and the republics. russia is the part of the russian federation that is in europe, the republics are mainly the parts in asia. kazhackstan is a country where most of the population actually lives in asia

in russia about 25 million, of the 140 million lives in asia, and the asian part is about 2/3rd of the area. but the area is mostly empty area :)

the poor's wealth

nice ring to it...

A consumption-based value-added tax would be better. It avoids distortion problems involving whether intermediate goods are really intermediate. A "prebate" could be used just as easily with a VAT as with the fair tax. Our earned income credit is sort of like a prebate.

The administrative burden of the VAT is borne by business, not individuals, and there is a built-in anti-cheat element to the VAT because the intermediate transactions are declared in two sets of books and cheating would show up as a discrepancy.

I don't buy the "transparency" argument against the VAT because all tax changes are debated by Congress.

Its inherently unfair just as deriving revenue mainly from excise taxes would be unfair. It puts an extraordinary burden on those without means. The rich naturally use a smaller portion of their wealth to consume.


Currently the graduated tax system is lame, partly because the brackets have been chiseled away at by republicans. The highest marginal rate should be 90% and we should restore the rates we had in the 50s. This system was tried and proven.

Kreuzi do count them as part of Europe but for the sake of my generalization they aren't a western nation like how kazakhistan isn't, despite being part of Europe. Russia is backwards, an oligarchy, and corrupt. They don't really fit with the example of western social democracies I was making.

veta, I thought the idea of the prebate check was there to totally eliminate the tax burden up to the poverty level, meaning that the poorest would essentially pay zero taxes.

Then the burden would be on the middleclass. Ultimate this isn't even the most glaring problem with such an idea. Wealth condensation into the top 1% would still occur and drive everyone's livelihood down. Like I said, stick with a tried and proven system: the 50s tax system. As skrum put it, the nation isn't a place to experiment on.

I said that?