Flattening the Tax
Imagine if you could file your entire tax return on a postcard. This could be just one benefit of a flat tax system. A flat tax still requires wealthy individuals to pay more than middle or lower class individuals. A flat tax simplifies the tax codes, making the paperwork easy for anyone to fill out and makes the IRS more efficient to run. A flat tax promotes faster economic growth by allocating people to spend more money back into the economy. The federal income tax system should be reformed from the current system to a mere flat rate for everyone, no matter what level income is made.
The flat tax still requires the wealthy to pay more in taxes than the middle and lower classes. Arthur O'Sullivan and Steven Sheffrin said,
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A simple tax is one that can be easily understood, records easily kept, and payments easily made. Our current system does not hold these traits. The tax code is complicated, records being lost is not far-fetched, and payments take months to be analyzed. An efficient tax is one that the government can collect taxes without excessive time or money. As stated before, it takes many months to process tax returns. According to IRS.gov, their budget in 2016 was almost two billion dollars, which could be greatly reduced if we moved to a flat tax system. A tax should be certain, which means it should be clear to how much tax is owed. In our current system two people who have the same exact tax information and deductions can owe the government two entirely different amounts. In the flat tax system, it would be unquestionable what a person owed in taxes. A tax should be equitable, meaning there is not too much or too little tax burden felt by anyone. In our current system, there is a great deal of burden on the upper class. What this does is lowers the incentive for making more money. Critics of the flat tax will say that the upper class should pay more in taxes because it is ‘unfair' for one person to make so much money. Although if you put yourself into those shoes, working hard your entire life, would you want the government taking a great deal of your hard-earned money and giving back to people who show no incentive to go out and
The “Fairness of Taxation or Wealth Tax” is where taxes are calculated by the net worth of the person or the couple (household). This would be hard for tax collectors to determine each and every component of net worth of a person.
However, I believe the Flat Rate would provide the best alternative, as it is the easiest to revert back to the original if necessary while eliminating a lot of the concerns that are raised about our current system such as equality, complexity, and cost efficiency. Works Cited Hall, A. (2001, August). The X-Men: The New York Times. The Flat Income Tax and the Fair Tax Consumption Tax: A Comparison of Federal Taxation Proposals. Retrieved from https://wilmu.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/pid-4981484-dt-content-rid- 14738969_1/courses/POL.326.DIS.B2T01.FA2013/FlatTaxFairTaxComparison.pdf.
The tax policy in the United States is very confusing. When the tax policy was originally written in 1913 it was four hundred pages. Now, over the past ninety one years, that tax policy has evolved to over 72,000 pages. Since the tax code has become so lengthy and nearly impossible to understand, the topic of tax reform has been in the minds of many. Although, most barely think about tax reform until tax season. It is a controversial subject due to the impact a change in tax code would have on the American people. The two most popular and widely known stakeholders in this debate are the two major political parties in the United States, the Democrats and the Republicans. The two parties share absolutely no common ground on the subject of tax reform, other than thinking the other parties solution is wrong. The Democrats, in general, want to raise taxes on the wealthy, while Republicans, generally, want to cut taxes for everyone (Democratic Party) (GOP). Unfortunately, with the United States economy currently doing so poorly, the parties can no longer afford to remain at a standstill, some sort of compromise is going to have to be made. The implementation of a flat tax, and discarding the current tax system would be a compromise that both parties can agree on and will simplify the tax code, overall benefiting all Americans.
II. Implementing a flat tax without significantly increasing the deficit is impossible without shifting the burden from the rich to the middle-class, instead our current progressive tax policy needs to be changed so that it is simpler and does not allow corporations to abuse the tax loopholes.
Many ponder the idea of federal taxes and whether the wealthy deserve to pay a higher percentage rate of their overall income. That is, they argue that because our society needs more equality and a lower national budget deficit, taxes on the rich must be raised. This specific topic has been discussed for decades, and due to the severely different perspectives, it is unclear whether the two sides will ever come to an agreement. President Barack Obama and much of the Democratic Party strongly lean towards raising taxes on the rich, while the conservatives and the Republican Party heavily lean towards a more balanced flat tax. However, after extensive research and focus on what would be best for the equality of individuals, the nation and its economy, this paper will firmly prove that the top one percent should not be taxed any more than they are today.
Eliminating the confusion of distributing all of the taxes throughout the country would be in our government's vital interest. Every two weeks I will go through the exact same ritual, I will receive my paycheck and furiously tare it open to see how much money I will be able to lose in the next two weeks. I'm always blessed with a beautiful number at the top that is very fair and deserving for the hard work that I do on the weekly basis. Then I always see a whole bunch of abbreviations, different dollar amounts, then the number at the bottom that always seems to depr...
One person may see that the increase taxation on the poor and the decrease taxes on the wealthy is not an issue because the wealthy pay a lot of taxes already. However, many people don’t realize the fact that, yes, the wealthy are paying a lot of taxes because they make more money, but they can afford to pay more. Recently, in a CNN article, more than forty millionaires want their taxes to increase, which proves the fact that the wealthy have plenty of money to give back to the community. In addition, their just going to keep getting wealthier and wealthier by the
For the past eleven years, opponents from the left and right side of the political spectrum have lambasted the FairTax. Politicians who don’t want to relinquish the power given them by the current tax system are the proposal’s biggest opposition. They don’t want to give up the withholding system. They don’t want to give up the sixteenth amendment. They don’t want to lower taxes. They oppose the FairTax for the sake of their own greed and agendas. Despite all their baseless criticism, the FairTax is continuing to gain support on the grass roots and political levels. The statistical data and scientific analysis, compiled over the last eleven years, is overwhelming proof of the FairTax’s ability to bring transparency to the tax system, broaden the tax base and to fix the U.S. economy.
The U.S. along with only 6 other countries use the progressive tax, the progressive tax is a very unfair and inconsistent taxing system.This system has a varying rate that taxes the higher income homes with a higher rate,and the lower with a reduced rate.The Flat tax is a taxing system that has one flat tax rate for all ranges of income homes. The flat tax has been proposed multiple times throughout legislation , but not once has it been taken seriously as a cure to fix the current tax problems.The U.S. needs to adopt the Flat Tax because it is a simplistic system that would be fair to use and also promote economic growth.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a program that was set in place, in 1975, to improve “the economic status of low-income persons […] granting nearly $40 billion to low-income households” (Borjas, 59). As is clear from the name of the program, The EITC is a program that provides tax credits to those who qualify, the EITC could even produce a negative tax liability for some households, in particular the type I will discuss, which would provide substantial income increases for these households. In order to qualify for the EITC, the recipients must be active members of the labor force, in that they must have labor income, and for the group that I will be focusing on, single mothers, total household income must be below $33,241 for single parents with one child and $37,783 for single parents with two or more children. According to Economist Hillary Hoynes, in a presentation given to the Chicago Federal Reserve Board in 2007, the maximum available credit for a single parent with 1 child was $2,853, with the maximum available credit for single parents with two or more children being $4,716. (Hoynes, 2007) The EITC has provided assistance to countless American families while still providing them with an incentive to remain in the labor force, unlike many other welfare programs. I will focus on a certain subset of people receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit: single-mothers.
Many presidents have different ways to tax the people. Tax policies are the government's choice to enforce who and how much they have to pay for their taxes every year. The presidents can determine what percent they can pay by how much they make a year. George Bush and Ronald Reagan had tax policies that could have different and some may have been the same.
Adding to this is the notion that the “richer are getting richer and the poor, poorer.” (Reich). When the income of the middle and lower class is either the same or shrinking while the income of the upper class is improving, the wealth gap is evident (Scott). What illustrates this is that today the 10% of richest Americans hold 40% of all the wealth in the U.S. (Scott). Another aspect of the wealthiest staying wealthy is the ability to pass down their wealth; otherwise known as inheritance. Even with estate taxes, the wealthy still manage to find loopholes where they don’t have to pay as much, or even at all. In other words, “lower income people pay a greater share of their income sales and payroll taxes than higher-income people” (Henchman). In America, the wealthy are being favored while everyone else has to pay.
The current tax system that the United States uses contains several flaws. First of all, it is very complex. It is comprised of many various variables that can create loopholes. These loopholes can cause two equal income families to be paying very different tax rates. In fact, there are 480 different types of tax forms (Website). The current tax system is also very unfair for the wealthy. Because it is a progressive tax, it is higher for people who have higher incomes. People should not be punished for being successful. If a flat tax policy were instituted, then it would simplify the complicated tax system, create fairness within the economy, and promote a desire to thrive financially.
Everyone is France that is classified as “middle-class” pays the same tax, no matter what if their income is on the lower or higher end, promoting social equality within a certain tax bracket. However, the part of their system that is undemocratic is that the rich pay a much higher percent of their income, and people that have very low income do not pay income tax. The United States’ system is similar on the latter, but they have more broken down tax brackets that have the lower part of “middle class” citizens pay a lower percentage than the higher
Tax cuts are only benefiting the richest people, and will widen the inequality gap between the rich and the poor. A recent report from the Congressional Research Service states, “as the top tax rates a...