Dee D. Flint wrote:
"Kim W5TIT" wrote in message
...
But, if it meant a) one tax for all--no tax breaks for any, at about
10-14%
per person and entity, b) taxing even religious institutions--anything
outside of actual *church* and parish properties, c) cutting the fat from
the equation, both in terms of programs and personnel; and there was still
a
need for higher taxes, I'd be willing to pay my *fair* share.

Kim W5TIT



The average person is already paying nearly half their income in taxes if
you include all taxes plus the ones you pay indirectly. This is hardly
reasonable nor would it be reasonable for anyone to pay even more.

Where did your 50% number for the average person come from? Since
revenues from all levels of government, as well as the nation's gross
income, are well known, the average of all taxes isn't a difficult
number to compute with some precision.

In fact the Tax Foundation (which should be called the Anti-Tax Foundation,
their interests would never lead them to underestimate this number) does
exactly this to calculate their "Tax Freedom Day", seen at

http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday.html

Tax freedom day this year was April 19, meaning the average total tax burden
was 30%. Note that the tax burden for the median wage earner was probably
somewhat less than this since higher tax rates on corporate income and the
wealthy tend to skew the average higher (see the "Q&A about critiques..."
link on the same page).

I hence can't see how you concluded that the average American's total tax
burden is anywhere near 50% of their income. I also recently saw (but have
since lost) a table which showed comparative tax burdens for 36 industrialized
nations. Only the northern-most European countries have total tax burdens
in the 50% ballpark, while US taxes in 2003 were 35th on the list, with only
Mexico lower (in 2000, Japan and Korea were also lower). Not that this
suggests the US is in any way under-taxed; if you add in the additional 12%
of income spent on private medical care you end up within a few percent,
plus or minus, of the tax burdens in Canada and (south-)Western European
countries which fund medical care via taxes.

I don't know how you define what is "reasonable" for someone to pay, and
I certainly wish I paid less tax rather than more, but it is the case that
you get about what you pay for. For an example of an industrialized country
with significantly lower taxes one can look to, say, China, and observe that
to get this tax rate one would also need to live with China-like
infrastructure and services. This isn't a tradeoff I'd recommend, personally.

Dennis Ferguson