{"id":4912,"date":"2011-10-06T01:49:50","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T05:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4912"},"modified":"2011-10-06T07:45:18","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T11:45:18","slug":"is-this-really-a-good-time-to-raise-taxes-on-the-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/10\/06\/is-this-really-a-good-time-to-raise-taxes-on-the-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this really a good time to raise taxes on the poor?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve had an interesting conversation here at the In Box in the past over ideas surrounding a national “flat tax” for income and this idea has also come up in a number of coffee shop conversations I’ve had the last few weeks.<\/p>\n

In doing a little research on Republican rising star Herman Cain, I explored some of his thinking about a new, slightly more complicated flat tax, one that creates — in effect — three new flat taxes:<\/p>\n

One for corporations, one for individual income and one for all goods and services bought and sold.<\/p>\n

Cain talks about his so-called “9-9-9” plan in this video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Flat taxes have a lot of appeal right now, with the popularity of the concept buoyed by the awful complexity of the current tax system, and by stories of zillionaires dodging any tax burden.<\/p>\n

But the simplest and most bluntly factual thing that you can say about the flat tax proposed by Mr. Cain is that it would raise taxes immediately on tens of millions of Americans.<\/p>\n

It would also — again, this is fact, not opinion — shift a significant proportion of the tax burden from the country’s wealthiest people and from corporations onto people with lower and middle-ranged incomes.<\/p>\n

Here’s why:<\/p>\n

Roughly half of all American workers currently pay no actual income taxes at all.\u00a0 Those millions of workers would go immediately from paying zilch to giving up one out of every ten dollars they earn.<\/p>\n

But the plan also envisions working class and poor Americans paying for a nearly ten percent hike in the cost of goods and services they buy.<\/p>\n

In New York state, combined state and national sales taxes would top 13%, meaning a huge surcharge to everything you buy.<\/p>\n

It’s true that wealthy families would continue to pay most of the taxes, but their share would diminish substantially.<\/p>\n

Their marginal income tax rates would decline by roughly two thirds and estate taxes would be permanently eliminated.<\/p>\n

Another wrinkle here is that, according to the best estimates<\/a>, the amount of revenue taken in by the “9-9-9” tax would be about $360 billion less than the government currently takes in through the taxation formula we have now.<\/p>\n

That means even deeper cuts in the services and programs than are now being envisioned in Washington, if we want a balanced budget.<\/p>\n

Mr. Cain and other conservatives are convinced that a flat-tax formula of this variety would still benefit all Americans — even the poorest — because it would spur a huge surge in economic activity.<\/p>\n

The result, they say, would be more jobs and less government.<\/p>\n

But I wonder if that formula works for real people in real-life situations.\u00a0 Let’s say there’s a single mom in Plattsburgh raising a couple of kids on a $30,000 a year salary.<\/p>\n

Under Mr. Cain’s plan, she goes from paying no income taxes to coughing up nearly $3,000 a year.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s a substantial hit.<\/p>\n

And then there’s the 9% price hike — because of the new sales tax — on everything she buys, from groceries to school clothes to the used car she needs to buy to get to work.<\/p>\n

Can the vast pool of America’s struggling working families afford that kind of hit right now?\u00a0 Your thoughts welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve had an interesting conversation here at the In Box in the past over ideas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4912"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4912\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}