Oh good heavens help us...

[kellinator]

The latest idea from Herr Shrub: Let's get rid of the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax.

This is the worst idea I've heard from the Idiot-in-Chief since... oh, who's counting?

I don't know a lot about economics, but I come from Tennessee, home of one of the highest sales taxes in the nation (including on food, and yes I do mean groceries). And sales taxes are definitely regressive.

Do the math. Say a person needs x amount of food to survive, taxed at 8%. For Bill Gates that tax is nothing; for the average middle-class American it's an 8% jump in the food bill. Talk about your cost of living increase...

I guess this is his way of saying he doesn't think he's put enough of the tax burden on the middle and lower class.

And if this post pisses you off, I don't give a fuck.

EDIT: Excellent article from resipsaloquitor:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/11/news/economy/election_tax/index.htm?cnn=yes

Comments

Re: here's the problem I'm having with all this

[polychromatic22.livejournal.com]

I hate the schools. I really do. I'd like them all to go bankrupt and force us to start again.

I have a hard time with these numbers and want more verification, but as I understand it, somewhere near 20% of all u.s. high school graduates are functionally illiterate. that's higher than it's ever been, even though we spend more per child than we ever had. Even if you try to tie it in as a percentage of our earnings that we spend per child, it's still higher.

Money isn't helping the schools.

We seriously need to drastically rethink our strategy towards teaching our children.

Aside from that, property taxes pay for schools, that's a county tax, not affected by income tax. Unless you're talking about federal grants?

Re: here's the problem I'm having with all this

[not-hothead-yet.livejournal.com]

I understand hating the educational system we have; I hate it too. Unfortunately, there are a lot of kids going to these schools right now and yanking all the monies away from the schools right now isn't going to make ANYTHING better. You say money isn't helping the schools, well that's a difficult position to argue because there isn't a lot of money going to the schools anyway. How can you say money isn't helping someone if you're only giving them 40% of what they need to survive? So the answer is to give them higher standards and cut their funding?? That's exactly what Bush did. Now schools are doing worse... bfsurprise!

Federal grants don't make up much of the school budgets but what most people are talking about when they refer to federal funding of schools is the disparity between the new standards ("No Child Left Behind" act) and the drop in federal grants for programs that help enact the changes necessary to meet the new standards. If a school has a failing literacy rate, most likely the school needs tutors, specialists and specialized materials to get that literacy rate back up. You don't attack a problem of failure by applying the same methods that brought you there, yet that is exactly what many schools are having to do because they cannot meet the new standards without getting additional funding to apply NEW methods.

Then there's special education... the vast majority of education funding for special education does come from federal grants/programs. It's a whole different ballgame than "regular" education. Yet, the new NCLB act requires ALL students at every school, including "special" students to take the test and have their scores averaged into all the other kids' scores. Where's the fairness in that? The catch-22 is that IF a school has a special ed class (or even just one student) they can get approved for MUCH more funding in order to meet the special needs of the child(ren) but then they have new scores to average into their entire schools grade - how likely do you think it will be that an Autistic child or a blind Down's Syndrome child will bring UP the schools average score on the all-so-important tests given to us by the wonderful NCLB act? Hahaha.

Sorry, I went off, but the subject of education is much more complex than just "they suck, let's pull the plug on them".
At the very least, you really want thousands of children running around all day unsupervised?