No, they pay almost all of the federal taxes. That's indisputable. The top 10% pay 70%+ of the federal income taxes. This is even with a high level of evasion, of course.Rich people avoid the current tax like crazy, almost to the point of not paying much of it.
My main point is that I think you're contradicting yourself. You're telling us rich people who want to make more money are going to be put off by a 30% tax rate and not make investments they would have made with a 15% tax rate. At the same time, you're telling us that imposing a new 25% sales tax on everything at the retail point of purchase won't discourage rich people from buying things. This seems very peculiar to me. I am a rich person and I choose to forgo potentially making $100 million because I don't want to pay $30 million in tax, but I seem to have no problem paying an extra $25 million for my $100 million plane. In the first case I would be up $70 million but refuse to do it; in the second case I would be down $125 million in cash but have no problem with it.I wrote a high level paper on this subject, and I lost my sources, so I have not mentioned this, but going from memory, consider the following.
They did a survey of something like 500 companies, I think it was 2/3 said they would be very likely to relocate their headquarters and manufacturing to the united states.
The rich folks who keep money off shore may still decide to keep it over there. I'm just saying that any and all penalties would be removed from them deciding to bring it home. And since they could invest it tax free here, it only makes sense that they would.
There are lots of knee jerk reactions to this.
People hear about it and think, god, everything I buy is going to cost so much more, don't really think about anything else, and are opposed to it. Or they see how other states have sales taxes that are regressive to the poor, and don't like this.
They simply can't see the forest for the trees.
You get 100% of your pay check, no deductions.
The folks who supply everything you buy suddenly pay no taxes, so they can get the goods to market much cheaper. Competition drives the cost down.
The poor and low incomes are protected by an advanced tax rebate every month. A family of 4 gets several hundred dollars per month. This covers the tax they will pay on the goods and servies they buy.
Lots of questions answered here.
The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan body dominated by professional staff, estimated the national sales tax would have to be 36% to be revenue neutral. Add in state sales taxes and the rate approaches 50% in some states. I think this sky high rate would discourage the purchase of new goods, encouraging the purchase of the tax-advantaged goods you've mentioned multiple times. This means less revenue for the federal government and a hit to the economy, which is centered on the production and sale of new goods.
If the used car market explodes, for example, because people don't want to pay a 50% tax on a new car, what kind of impact does that have on the auto industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and has hundreds of billions of dollars in economic impact every year?