Taxes cap out in a progressive tax system and they provide many loop holes that only high bracket earners can qualify for.

1. None of those links in any way disproves anything he said.

2. Tax-code transparency is completely separate from tax-code progressivity

3. (and this actually underscores point one) America functionally has a flat tax, even skewing towards regressivity, when you calculate all the various taxes we have to pay.

And seriously weren't you complaining two whole days ago about spoiled girls in SUVs or whatever? So your solution is to make it even easier for Paris Hilton and the cast of MTV's Laguna Beach to pile up money while contributing nothing to the economy?

The idea that people who benefit the most from our society pay proprtionate to the benefits they enjoy strikes me as pretty darn fair, personally.

The idea that people at the bottom of the ladder should have the chance to improve their lot in our society do so without being crippled by a disproportionately burdensome tax bill also strikes me as pretty darn fair.

The idea that the wealthy should contribute to the public good rather than indulging their bottomless greed by accruing ever greater shares of our society's riches, ultimately allowing them to wield massively disproportionate and corrupting influence over our society, strikes me as extremely gosh-darn fair.

That was possibly even more grossly dishonest than most Wall Street Journal editorials, I honestly don't know where to even begin.

So the fact that the countries using these flat taxes are getting more revenue and growth than they did with a progressive tax scale means what then? Please tell me how that example doesn't disprove that flat taxes are a bad idea? They are working, the concept is in practice and working. It is being used in NJ, has been sice the 50's. It is working there.

I agree that people should pay what they can to contribute. All told I pay around 30% of my income to taxes, I own no property so I'm not paying property taxes yet, but those will add a couple more percentage points. With the flat taxes, the high end of the spectrum has a 19% tax, that sounds pretty good to me.

So you are now endorsing the policies of the government that you so often speak out against? So feel free to pull up more stuff that isn't pertinent.

All I'm saying is that the flat tax system is in use is working and working well, if the numbers reflected in those countries would be at all similar in the US then we'd be able to take care of the Social Security issues and reduce the defecit.

Consumers now are more aware of buying trends, how the stock market is affected by tax and interest rates, and allow that to affect their buying decisions. People are likely to buy more and invest more when things are good. Infusing that much more cash into the system does work, tax breaks have raised the stock market to all time highs. Trickle down failed massively in the Depression, there is no denying that fact. I think today it works, my previous statement about the stock market and trends in buying due to tax breaks, people are more aware and their spending reflects that.

I heard about a "fast food" hospital, where you go in, get charged a small sum of money for the ER stay, and get out of the hospital within 20-40 minutes.

Anyone have any specifics, or is this just a rumor with no factual basis?

You do realize none of those things at all indicate trickle down is working. Heck it almost demonstrates the opposite. For starters, the vast majority of people with enough invested in the stock market to see a noticeable profit already have a very considerable wealth. Not to mention as the buy more stock the majority of the money goes to majority stock holders, who are already pretty damn rich. Its a viscous cycle. Further, the products that are increasing in purchase amount the most are those high end multi-million dollar super toys. The profit generated from them goes mainly to the owners of the company who once again are already rich. So of all the money freed up by tax breaks for the rich most of it cycles right back around to the rich.

Not to mention I real indicator of the health of our economy is property. The vast majority of investments made by the lower income bracket are in realistate and somewhat in cars. Last time I heard the realistate market, more specifically mortgages, were heading for disaster. That is not a good sign for things to come; at least not for the lower income brackets.

trickle down only works if the rich spend money, but fact is they dont. When you are making hundreds of thousands a day, you litterally cant spend the money fast enough.

Now I dont understand why this is an issue, why if you have 50 billion dollars you dont just give a few to those in need, but fact is they have it and they dont. In fact they use this money to bribe their way out of taxes.

The best solution is not a flat % but a percent that increases as you go up the economic bracket. The poor pay 1%, the extremely wealthy pay 75%. Oh and I did the math. The super rich can actually live their life style on only about 2% of what they have.

Aerozord, I could live, without having to work for the rest of my life, on three million dollars.

Comfortably. Very comfortably.

That is what we have, a progressive tax scale, I'm suggesting an alternate that is working quite well in Europe.

We have a progressive tax scale in theory. In truth once you hit a certain tax bracket options appear that make it regressive. Also, its a bit too progressive in that it severely burdens the middle class. You start making about $80-$100 thousand a year and all of a sudden you owe a thousand dollars or more over and above what was taken from your paycheck. That's even claiming 3-4 dependents. I know this because my dad finally got a decent job and we suddenly found ourselves in this new tax bracket. We had been living just fine on $50-60 thousand a year and now suddenly things got super tight because the income taxes went through the roof.

So yes we have a progressive tax but all the progressiveness is packed into the bottom 30% or so of the tax bracket. The rest of it is either flat or even slightly regressive due to tax loopholes. We don't need a flat tax, we need a non-biased tax system that is truly progressive over the entire income range.

I've been backwards and forwards through both of those links (of the three links, two linked to copies of the same interview) and the only parts I saw which even appeared to address this claim were this from the interview --

-- which makes no claim as to tax revenues and itself admits that the GDP increase cannot be disentangled from other changes, and this from the Wiki entry --

-- which is footnoted to this Hoover Institute statement which itself states that GDP growth was halved after the change in tax code and this IMF study which notes that the Russian tax is not even particularly a flat tax (as well as noting that tax revenues in several tax-flattening countries did in fact fall), and neither article in any way addresses the confounding effects of concurrent reforms .

In addition to which neither article makes any particular effort to address the impact of such taxation on wealth concentration or median income

And further in addition to which neither article makes anything like a prediction of what would be the expected effects of a flat tax on an actual developed economy.

Please clarify what you mean by this statement.

EDIT:

Again, I would add to this that after accounting for the entire tax burden - payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, consumption taxes, state and local taxes - progressivity pretty much entirely disappears.