Equitable Tax Reform
This post is another chapter from my past. As a child, I was very inspired by the work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Then, in 1962, I spent the summer in Karuizawa, Japan, and read an article in The Japan Times about a tribe in Africa where the entire adult population was blind and children were used as seeing eyes for adults. I flew into a rage, thinking, if I were a doctor, I could reach a few thousand people in the course of a career. If I were a teacher, I could perhaps encourage better understanding of health and hygiene and maybe people would take more precautions to avoid what must sometimes seem inevitable. If I were an economist, I could try to set the wheels of progress in motion and the quality of life would improve for those who are impoverished and destitute. I wrote a letter to Yale University explaining why I wanted to become a development economist and was miraculously accepted, with a personal note from the admissions official saying it was the most passionate application ever received by their office.
Being a woman before the time when job discrimination was banned, it took a while before I got overseas, this with the State Department, first in Vietnam and then in India. In Vietnam, there were about 40 economists in our department, but I was the only one assigned to fiscal reform. The Vietnamese had inherited a French system in which taxpayers submitted paperwork and auditors in the Ministry of Finance would calculate the bill. If one’s paperwork happened to remain at the bottom of the pile, the window of opportunity for collecting taxes would pass after three years. Given the war and chaos, most people were not paying taxes because many auditors had been drafted and the Ministry was vastly understaffed.
Along with my Vietnamese assistant, a lovely lady who had studied economics in Australia, we proposed shifting from reliance on income to consumption taxes, but unlike the Trump proposals, the taxes were to be levied mostly on luxury goods, zero taxes on essentials like food, housing, clothing, transportation, medical services, education, etc. There was no fixed rate but rather different rates for different items. For example, a boat used on the Mekong River to transport food to a market might be tax-free but a yacht used for Sunday tourism might have a high rate of taxation.
As I listen to the proposals for reform that political candidates espouse, my feathers are ruffled because the impact of change would benefit a few, but pose a major hardship on those who are already scratching and clawing. I will explain, but meanwhile, I would note that the South Vietnamese government did adopt our proposals which were also used as models for many other developing countries.
The U.S. is not, however, a developing country. It is a badly managed nightmare that is rapidly propelling us into a post-industrial society that will perforce become an agrarian culture, hopefully without GMOs, chemtrails, and other unnatural components. In this interim stage, we are a suffering from hugely corrupt financial fraud so, in this situation, I think Ellen Brown’s ideas are the proper solution. She proposed a 0.1% financial transactions tax and total elimination of the income tax and all other taxes.
Here is my argument in favor of her proposal. Anyone who owns stock is at minimum a little better off than those who are currently destitute or close to it. A tiny tax of 0.1% would not pose a hardship on anyone. The tax would be very easy to administer and barely rock the boat of even trillionaires. Taking Ellen Brown’s ideas to the next level, she maintains that a tax of 0.25% would allow the government to fund projects and benefits that are currently unaffordable. How much simpler can it get?
Though I agree with Trump on the subject of illegal immigration, I believe his Wharton School studies are completely obsolete . . . just as my ideas in the sixties have been improved upon by Ellen Brown. I don’t expect to be heard, but if you share this post with others, maybe we will be heard.
People in very low economic brackets do not currently pay income taxes so a change to consumption taxes would severely ding their budgets. If we are currently dismayed by the soaring cost of groceries, imagine how we would feel if every time we swiped our credit card, we paid 23% more than we pay today.
In other posts, I have mentioned how much I have traveled and “seen the world”. The U.S. does not have the highest standard of living in the world nor the most equitable system of taxation. I worked on Wall Street in the mid-sixties and millionaires were like billionaires today. These clients were in a maximum 2% tax bracket. My starting salary was $7000 a year, not per month. I was in a 14% tax bracket.
Many countries have free education and even stipends for students. A few give free houses on the citizen’s 18th birthday. Many have generous unemployment benefits and no one living on the street. I promised to give my ideas on healthcare reform IF people requested this. Three people made that request, but I will post on it because it is very extensive and would constitute a great improvement over what we have now and it would be much more affordable!
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