by Patrick J. Buchanan
"Over the late 19th century, real GDP and employment doubled, annual average real earnings rose by over 60 percent and wholesale prices fell by 75 percent, thanks to marked improvement in productivity."
Astonishing. And what is the difference between that age and ours? A 35 percent income tax rate on individuals and corporations that did not exist then, and would have been regarded by Americans of the Gilded Age as the satanic work of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
You forget the THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of pages of regulations, idiotic, out-of-control IP and obscene tax rates (on individuals, gasoline, etc.)
Since the U.S. corporate income tax now produces less than 10 percent of federal revenue and less than 2 percent of gross domestic product, abolish it. Get rid of it.
How to make it up? Put a 10 percent tariff on imports entering the United States, which last year added up to $2.7 trillion.
Uhm, Pat, wouldn't the abolition of the Corporate Sales tax in itself 'make up' the loss? Why is the concern ALWAYS to 'make up the loss'? Why not begin GUTTING programs to 'make up'?
This tax reform would thus be revenue neutral.
Not likely, but we can certainly humor your life's effort to prop-up the perpetual loser that is protectionism.
And what would a corporate income tax rate of zero, with a 10 percent tariff on goods entering the U.S.A. from abroad, accomplish?
First, every U.S. corporation that had moved abroad in search of lower taxes in recent years would start thinking about coming home and bringing its production and its jobs back to America.
Second, that $2 trillion in income U.S. companies have stashed abroad would come roaring back into U.S. institutions.
Third, foreign companies would begin to relocate and produce here in America, both to get around the tariff and pay no taxes.
Fourth, U.S. producers would see sales soar inside the $17 trillion U.S. market, at the expense of foreigners who would pay a 10-percent admission fee to get into this market, a fraction of what they used to pay in the 19th century.
Uhm, not Pat, the expense is undertaken by the Consumer -- you know, AMERICANS -- who desire products produced someplace other than the US.
Here is a PRIMER for you, Pat, and the LOSER that is protectionism that you continue to proffer:
- Protection or Free Trade: An
Examination of the Tariff Question, With Especial Regard to the Interests
of Labor
- Henry George
- http://mises.org/etexts/freetrade.pdf
- Henry George
- "Protectionism is simply a plea that consumers, as well as
general prosperity, be hurt so as to confer permanent special privilege
upon groups of less efficient producers, at the expense of more competent
firms and of consumers. But it is a peculiarly destructive kind of
bailout, because it permanently shackles trade under the cloak of
patriotism."
--MJ
"The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery." -- Albert Jay Nock
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