Me? Well, I Vote to Abolish Ted Cruz.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz had himself an attention sucking weekend. In Cruz’s book, that qualifies as pole dancin’ at Dirty Larry’s Strip Club. The boy is an exhibitionist.
Used to be in Texas, we hid our crazy uncles in the attic. Now we elect them to congress.
First off, he’s making headlines about being a Proud Wacko Bird. He’s unnaturally pleased about John McCain labeling him a wacko bird because people will actually go to a zoo to see a wacko bird and most folks won’t cross the street to see John McCain. Ted Cruz does not care if you come to watch him in a cage throwing poop, just so long you come.
And then according to the Dallas Morning News (a place where alert is a dirty word) Cruz is “launching” his idea to abolish the IRS.
Ted went to New York City last weekend to push his idea. It should be noted that Rick Perry was already there, which raises the IQ level of both states by 30 or 40 points.
Ted was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that tax experts called him “confused.” Honey, I’m not a tax expert but I know for a fact that Ted Cruz rarely knows if he’s getting up or going to bed.
It seems that he wants either a 23% sales tax, a postcard or some damn thing, or to just let Rick Perry be king and him be prince. He also wants taxpayers to “self-report earnings, major deductions and how much they owe.” Oh yeah, because everybody is so damn honest. He also favors a flat tax.
Here ya go —
Billionaire businessman Steve Forbes built his 2000 presidential bid around a flat tax. Rick Perry advocated a flat tax when he ran for president last year. Dick Armey, the former House majority leader from suburban Dallas, has long pushed a flat tax, as does FreedomWorks, the tea party group he founded.
Boy Howdy, that idea sure is popular. Hell, even FreedomWorks fired Armey.
Keep it up, Cruz, keep it up.
And by the way, if you see Ted, tell him he’s going to bed. He won’t know.
Thanks to Larry for the heads up.
Hmm, and what do all those “flat tax” vocalists have in common? Non-success on their campaigns. I wonder why they failed on such a platform?
1Cruz has relegated himself to be a permanent backseater; he will never attain a leadership position, just one vote in a hundred, nothing more. It is unlikely that he will ever be the author of significant legislation. It is more likely his fellow Republican Senators will be nearly as unwelcoming as Democrats of anything he proposes.
But for what? Does Cruz have no greater goal than to remain on the goverment payroll. The job pays well, but, given his fancy sounding education, doesn’t he aspire to some greater achievement? Or does he really believe acting as a back-stabbing, reactionary demagogue is the path to power and possibly the White House? Or, stranger still, does he sincerely believe his insane yammering?
2Uncle Dave said it all.
3@Uncle Dave–It terrifies me, but I think he sincerely (in an emperor being naked kinda way) believes his own twaddle…
4And heaven save us from a true believer…they start wars and are responsible from more damage that a reasonable person can understand…
” I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” It’s my favorite Jefferson quote…as a man of reason, Jefferson understood that a country founded by witch burning fanatics had a long way to go to be blessed by being reasonable–I too tremble, for Fascism is easy and that’s what Ted and his ilk are leading too if we follow the thoughts out to their end…
“He also wants taxpayers to “self-report earnings, major deductions and how much they owe.”
Excuse me.
Bwhahahahahahahahahahahahaha…………..
Ahem.
Just like the 1% who always honestly report their income & offshore earnings, right?
From now on, I’m gonna tell the IRS I think I only owe $10.00 a year. That’s more than enough to cover Calgary Cruz’ actual worth salary wise.
5Poor baby. Look guys, we gotta find some seriously good candidates.
6Something that is always missing from the flat tax debate is that it could easily be modified to be progressive.
We should flatten our tax system by slowly phasing out a huge number of deductions and loopholes. However, we don’t need to get rid of the progressive tiers. That is, we could basically tax almost all income (earned and investment) with few exceptions, but have the same tiers we have now–just with lower rates for all.
7Putting all your confidential tax information, including your social security number on a post card. What could possibly go wrong?
I don’t know where Republicans find these people, but I do wish they would take them back to what ever cave they came from.
8Yes! Self report earnings! And with no IRS to audit anyone, you can expect complete honesty. Like when a social security number was not required to claim a dependent on your tax form, and it was relatively common for people to have 12 “children.” And let’s not stop there. Cruz should propose self regulated speed limits on every road, highway and city street. Self regulate our own personal DUI level. Cruz could really go places with this idea. That is, until he runs into a guy driving 100 miles an hour with a .3 BAC, who just paid $12 in federal taxes so he afford to buy a fast car and get drunk all of the time. And while the kinks are worked out of the plan, a lot of us would just have to stay home for awhile.
9Cruzzie doesn’t think these things through cuz he can’t tell the difference between real legislation that would reform the tax code and a vendetta. It would drive him ape ***t crazy to know that someone somewhere in this country does not have skin in the game and is not suffering any consequences for whatever he determines is “wrong doing”.
10Let’s just throw “self-reporting” our taxes into the same crazy bin as “self-deportation”.
11They’re both just self-serving attention grabbers geared towards the lowest IQ spectrum, i.e. the Tea Party.
The problem with a flat tax is the tax may be flat but the burden isn’t. Forgive me for the rant which follows but the whole “Flat Tax” thing genuinely gets my knickers in a knot.
A flat tax isn’t fair: 10 percent of income at the bottom of the earnings scale is hardly equal to 10 percent of income at the top. The cost of most goods is fixed, (you don’t pay proportionally less for gas or milk if you make less money), as such, the price of survival is fixed, making a flat tax not quite as flat as proponents like to pretend. When you are making $7.25 per hour, someone working 40 hours a week earns around $15,100 per year. Paying $1,510 might not seem like much but to such an individual, it is a vast sum, easily 2-3 months rent. Undoubtedly it is a far greater hit than $10,000 is to a person making $100,000.
A side note: minimum wage would have been roughly $21.72 if it had kept pace with inflation. Obama has suggested raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour which still fails to lift a family of 3 above the poverty level, but I digress.
As to the effect on the middle class, let us take for example, a flat tax of 15%. That would leave a family earning $40,000 with just $34,000. not quite at the poverty line but the loss of that $6,000 would hurt in all kinds of ways (e.g., health insurance premiums, college tuition, etc). On the other hand, a guy making $400,000 would be left with $340,000. Poor fellow! Hardly enough to scrape by on. He may have to sell one of his BMW’s.
All this leads to the next big problem, a flat tax ignores the nonlinearity of money. That is, it’s disproportionately harder to survive, the further you are below the subsistence level and the further above the subsistence level you are the faster your money aggregates (due to additional opportunity). I honestly don’t know the specific shape of the curve, but the most logical approach would seem to be to have a graduated tax that matches that shape.
It all comes down to fairness, and I think questions of fairness, though somewhat arbitrary, are important. For example, which is fairer, democracy or plutocracy? That is also a matter of opinion. Majority opinion.
Fairness, like beauty, “is in the eye of the beholder,” but to my eye, there’s nothing uglier than a flat tax. While I admit it would be difficult to convince a flat taxer that it’s unfair because he/she just doesn’t care, whatever the reasons for their fondness for flat taxes, fairness isn’t one of them.
Virtually all the variations on the flat tax that have been rolled out by presidential candidates like Perry and probably Cruz (Lord knows he always fails to deliver on specifics), aren’t actually examples of a pure flat tax; a pure flat rate would mean that one tax rate is applied to all income with no deductions or exemptions.
As taxpayers, we tend to like our deductions and exemptions. Corporations with their highly paid lobbyists and massive political campaign contributions like them as well! So many of the flat tax proposals already chip away at the simplicity of a flat tax by adding ands, ifs, and buts in an effort to appeal to voters and to obtain corporate contributions: That’s exactly how our tax code became so dysfunctional in the first place.
By the way, an analyses from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center projected that Perry’s flat tax plans would lead to decreased revenue, cutting it by about 27 percent by 2015. The Tax Policy Center also concluded that Perry’s plan would mean an increased tax burden on middle- and low-income families.
The Perry plan also included some exemptions and deductions that would make them less regressive. Perry’s included a $12,500 personal deduction, and deductions for “charitable contributions, mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and Social Security benefits.” So it isn’t a true flat tax
The United States briefly tried a flat 3 percent income tax between 1861 and 1872; a flat income tax was once again reintroduced in 1894 but was struck down by the Supreme Court. Instead, the U.S. has had a graduated or progressive income tax since World War I.
It has been a long time since we saw how a flat tax would play out here, so we tend to look at how it plays out in other countries that have adopted flat taxes. Oddly enough, many parts of the former Soviet Union have attempted flat taxes, I wonder if Cruz and Perry are aware of that? Wait! Could they be…..
If only Carnival Cruz and Gov Good Hair would partner up, that my friends is a ship in search of an iceberg, if ever I’ve heard one.
12One of the more dishonest claims about the “fair tax” is the claim that it is a 23% tax. The real tax is 30% but that number will scare people and so they play some math games to make it sound like a 23% tax. These claims are a lie.
The “fair tax” is really a very regressive tax that would hurt the economy and give the rich a very very large tax cut. Even the Bush administration concluded that the fair tax was a dumb idea http://mediamatters.org/research/2006/05/26/ignoring-bush-tax-panels-findings-boortz-again/135808
In their submission to the Panel, proponents of the FairTax claimed that a 30 percent tax exclusive sales tax rate would be sufficient not only to replace the federal income tax, but also to replace all payroll taxes and estate and gift taxes and fund a universal cash grant. In contrast, the Treasury Department concluded that using the retail sales tax to replace only the income tax and provide a cash grant would require at least a 34 percent tax-exclusive rate.
Some may wonder why the tax rate estimated by FairTax advocates for replacing almost all federal taxes (representing 93 percent of projected federal receipts for fiscal year 2006, or $2.0 trillion) is so much lower than the retail sales tax rate estimated by the Treasury Department for replacing the income tax alone (representing 54 percent of projected federal receipts for fiscal year 2006, or $1.2 trillion).
13Don’t ask how I know, but most taxpayers are so damn honest that it would make the Devil cry. As for a ‘fair tax’ or ‘flat tax’, well let’s just say “I’ll see ya’ll on the barricades. (al la 1789, 1848 or 1917)”.
Very grumpy Hippie in the Hollar
14@Deb – Exactly! The people who put forward the idea of a flat tax generally come from the Republican Party. The main concern of the Republican Party is to lower taxes for the wealthy. Remember that $300 check George Bush sent you in the mail 11 or 12 years ago? You got $300, the 1% got millions. A flat tax will mainly benefit one group of taxpayers, and that is the wealthy.
15Hold on with this stuff: “Ted went to New York City last weekend to push his idea. It should be noted that Rick Perry was already there, which raises the IQ level of both states by 30 or 40 points.” Here in NY we had Senator Alfonse Damnato a couple of terms, but threw him out in favor Schumer, Clinton, and now Kirsten Gillibrand as senators. Even my Congressman Peter King (former friend of the IRA across the pond) and oft-embarrassing right-winger has moved toward the center and announced his boycotting the NY-GOP fund-raiser featuring Cruz. King also blasted Rubio for coming to NY to raise money. New bumper sticker for Cruz/Rubio: “I Love New York$$$.” We suspect that as the GOP lemmings leap over the Tea-Party cliff, King may switch parties.
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