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Originally Posted by Robbie
1. People like Romney make most of their money with capital gains. Would you like to raise the rates on capital gain taxes?
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A national sales tax is by far the best way to go. We should be taxing consumption not income. If you are poor and buy little, you pay little. If you are poor but spend a lot, you pay a lot. Same thing if you are rich. It would encourage people to save money and cause people who spend the most money to pay the most in taxes. A millionaire and a poor person would pay the same exact amount of taxes on a flat screen television.
Some items would be tax exempt for everyone (like basic foods needed to survive), other items would be subject to a luxury surtax from anyone, like owning a very heavy gas-guzzling vehicle that erodes our roads faster than a standard vehicle (whether it's a wealthy guy in a new hummer or a poor guy in a 1970s stationwagon) .... but every person would pay the exact same tax amount on the same item no matter who bought it - and it would make no difference how you earned your money, only how you spent it.
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2. Student loans...the cost of higher education just coincidentally rose like crazy the minute the federal govt. got involved with student loans. The whole system is fucked up from the get-go. Just like medical care...the problem isn't the rates on student loans. The problem is that universities are overcharging so much that you NEED a student loan to go to college in the first place.
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The real problem is that student loans are not discharged by bankruptcy. That makes them very safe investments. Private universities are now bundling and packing their loan documents on a derivative market much the same way mortgage companies did with home loans... but these can't be discharged. The solution is a simple law that ties the amount any university can charge to the amount they spend on each student... much like the law that now requires insurance premium increases to be tied to the amount of money spent by the insurer on the insured.
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3. No great wonders will ever be built in our lifetime. Ecological groups make sure of that. The govt. would NOT build the Panama Canal in 2012. Nor the Hoover Dam. Or pretty much anything else. Hell, they can't even let a private company build the Keystone pipeline. But pretty much every "big" impressive thing the U.S. ever built would be illegal to build under current federal regulations.
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You are confused. Those groups will all fold soon enough. Citizens United, the destruction of unions and the rise of super PACs means you can now fund a presidential campaign with only a handful of ultra-wealthy sponsors. When 10 or 12 people can fund the election of a president and congress, the president and congress will do whatever those 10 or 12 people want. The koch brothers are leading the charge... they are oil men. The environment is on borrowed time. Just ask BP about the oil spill that nobody ever went to jail for....
