Uni Health Care

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

With a flat-rate tax, everyone pays the same proportionate amount of their earnings, and is provided with the same service.

They had a flat rate tax system in Hong Kong (15%) before the PRC took it back.That place made the US look like a socialist paradise. The argument for a flat rate of taxation is more simplistic than a real,and simple solution.

Flat rate taxation is essentially unjust and just does not work.[unless you're rich,then it's just dandy]

I'm strongly against the kind of Libertarianism often described by Americans on this and other sites:It seems to describe the worst aspects of the middle classes: Greedy, self indulgent and callous, AND espousing the fatuous, disingenuous ideal of the 'trickle down effect" of wealth.

It seems to be epitomised in the shallow, self absorbed attitude and screwy logic of those who oppose universal health care on the grounds that they don't need it.[yet]

To be truly affluent,a society needs; Full employment,high wages AND high taxes,personal and indirect. To be just it needs to ensure disadvantaged groups have a decent standard of living. It is a disgrace that in rich countries such as the US and Australia ,that ANY person,of any age should live on the street through necessity. It is also a disgrace that any person should be refused needed medical treatment or die because they cannot pay for the treatment.


Below some notes on flat tax,lifted from Wiki. If you're really interested ask a couple of economists with opposing views.

Fundamental problems

Perhaps the largest logical issue is that if the flat tax system has a large per-citizen deductible (such as the "Armey" scheme below), then it is effectively a progressive tax since the total income tax rate is increasing with increasing income. The admission that such a flat tax is not actually flat at all, would seem to undermine the notion that the "flatness" of the tax is itself a desirable feature. Any flat tax with an initial threshold deduction is inherently progressive. Thus, the undermining logic continues, if progression in the schedule is necessary then surely a more flexible form of progression is even more desirable.

In general, the question of how to eliminate deductions is fundamental to the flat tax design: deductions dramatically affect the effective "flatness" in the tax rate. Perhaps the single biggest necessary deduction is for business expenses. If businesses were not allowed to deduct expenses then businesses with a profit margin below the flat tax rate could never earn any money since the tax on revenues would always exceed the earnings. For example, grocery stores typically earn pennies on every dollar of revenue; they could not pay a tax rate of 25% on revenues unless their markup exceeded 25%. Thus business must be able to deduct their expenses even if individual citizens cannot. A practical difficulty now arises as to identifying what is an expense for a business. For example, if a peanut butter maker purchases a jar manufacturer, is that an expense (since they have to purchase jars somehow) or a sheltering of their income through investment. How deductions are implemented will dramatically change the effective, and thus flatness, of the tax.

Philosophical problems

Since the central philosophy of the flat tax is to minimize the compartmentalization of incomes into myriad special cases, a vexing problem is deciding when income occurs. This demonstrated by the taxation of interest income and stock dividends. The shareholders own the company and so the company's profits belong to them. If a company is taxed on its profits, then the funds paid out as dividends have already been taxed. It's a debatable question if they should subsequently be treated as income to the shareholders and thus subject to further tax. (The counter argument is that the stockholders don't own the losses: a "corporation" is an entity that enjoys many benefits of citizenship and thus should be treated, for tax purposes too, as if it were a separate citizen, and thus the dividends are more like interest on loans paid to the shareholders and thus subject to tax.) A similar philosophical issue arises in deciding if interest paid on loans should be deductible from the taxable income since that interest is in-turn taxed as income to the loan provider.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax#Fu...l_problems