Let's grow the economy!

Great Debates
1

  1. Get rid of business profit taxes. This just confuses everything. Profits get reinvested or paid out and then taxed as income.

  2. Get rid of capital gains taxes and tax gains as income. You’ll get a break when you invest. Reinvest your profits, or take them out at a lower income level to save money.

  3. Tax foreign investments. Want to invest in some other country? Fine. Pay the toll.

  4. Give a tax break to foreign investors. Make it a good deal to invest here.

  5. Give a tax break for investments. Investments are real, job creating investments, not pushing money around or trading anything that already exists. Besides not taxing the investment, add a few percentage points of additional deduction for the investments. So if you invest $1000, you get a $1100 deduction. (Not recommending 10%, its just a round number). Allow the deduction for investments in government bonds. There will always be something to invest in to get a deduction. Even for the smallest investors, and we are better off paying debt service domesticly.

  6. Set the income tax rate at 0% for the first $10,000 per person per year. The first $10,000 of dependent costs counts for the person paying the costs. So a two parent family with two kids pays nothing on the first $40,000 they earn. (Again, round number here).

  7. Set the tax rate at something reasonable for the next $10,000 to $250,000 per person per year… I don’t know what it will be, maybe 25% should be sufficient.

  8. Have a progressive tax rate starting at $250,000 per person per year, going from 25% to 75% at $2,000,000 person per year. (More round numbers). If you can make a lot of money, great. Invest it and you get to keep it. Otherwise you pay a lot of taxes.

  9. Get rid of all the other tax breaks. Some things like mortgage interest deductions and existing long term tax rates will have to be phased out over time. The changing tax structure shouldn’t create significant changes to the value of existing investments.

  10. Don’t include FICA taxes in there if it causes a problem. But I think we should stop the gimmicks.

Some of this is done in various ways already. This is intended to concentrate on economic growth and simplicity.

Obviously none of this happens as long as unlimited anonymous political [del]bribery[/del] continues, so let’s pretend that’s not happening.

Tell me what’s wrong here. I’ve thrown a lot of things together without really looking at how things interact.

2

Number 3 is stupid. US Citizens pay world wide tax on their foreign investments even if they are not US residents. A tax on foreign investment would just result in large numbers of people with money giving up their US citizenship to avoid the tax.

For the rest of it, too little too late. The US needs to have been investing in infrastructure over the last 10 years, instead you blew it all on Afghanistan, Iraq and the financial bailout.

Those manufacturing jobs are never coming back to the US.

3

I’ll take a look at that.

We certainly did. But we have to do something. Better late than never.

Some will. But I’m not talking about manufacturing jobs specifically. We can do a lot of R&D, and provide a lot of services. And they don’t have to have high rates of return either. That’s why the incentives are needed for domestic investment.

4

yes, most likely your dollar will continue to slide in value until you become economically competitive again, most likely when the US dollar is worth around 0.5 euros or so. That will bring foreign investment and jobs back to the US. Of course that means in global terms everyone in the US is earning half as much as they used to.

c’est la vie.