Topic: DeSantis Vows to Abolish IRS, Advocates Flat Tax in Presidential Bid Amidst Stif (Read 341 times)

He has not paid income Tax in over 30 years.
https://youtu.be/fy1WJ5hDCJg

You're both wrong. The birth certificate is a transfer of property form. Your parents signed you away in trust to the government. If you don't formally make statement to the government that you are an adult, no longer of trust age, they hold you in trust. They are the trustee. You don't own yourself because of this.

which is why you never own your home even if you have the loan paid off. you have to pay rent to the government for having your name on the deed. so people don't own houses. nor do they own land. they are simply tenants with a piece of paper that requires them to pay up every year or lose it.

you're right.

Don't need a lawyer, just need a functioning brain really. Except some people see the bling of a $100k pickup truck in neighbor's driveway and they think they MUST HAVE a bigger shinier one because that's how we roll. It is possible to pay with cash... however many (or most) people are addicted to debt so can't accept the possibility of living within their means and will agree to any scammy deal that allows them to have the shiny thing for "only $700 a month" (probably closer to $2000 for the aforementioned $100k pickup but I digress).

Nothing particularly wrong with borrowing money for a house or even for a car, if there are advantages of doing that (e.g. opportunity cost vs interest, or depreciation vs interest), it's when debt creates the illusion of being able to afford things that you can't really afford... that's when major issues happen, like the subprime crisis of 2008, and likely will cause the next bubble, and so on.

But you can't put math on your driveway to outbling your neighbors so people don't use math.


"common working man" likely pays a lot less to the IRS compared to state/county/city/sales/property taxes. That's where the real government grift happens but that's too complicated for a campaign slogan. Not that the convoluted federal tax forms couldn't use an overhaul, but the whole IRS obsession is more of a distraction from the absurd flustercuck of thousands of different tax jurisdictions trying to fuck you over whichever way they can because freedom.

Those situations you just described actually sound borderline illegal, to be honest. Are you implying people in the United States need to have a private lawyer in order to buy a car with the peace of mind of not being scammed? 
I mean, I was aware there were much people there trying to screw others for a living, but I never thought it was such an endemic thing, to the point one cannot easily buy a car without having to be aware of hidden fees or longer-than-expected loans.
Here it is different, we dont have credit, just recently we have managed to get some of our inflation under control, so banks have managed to increase credits again for the average citizen, not much only 200-300$ limits for cards. If one wants to buy a car or a house one needs to have all the cash on hand at the moment of signing the property transference. No added fees or anything like it.
It is interesting how the excess of credit or the lack of it can have an impact of the "economal culture" of a whole population and a whole country.
I wonder how the life style of the average American person would change if they did bot have access to credit, as it happened to us for many years...

Sadly, in today's environment there's simply no chance they will be held accountable since most in Ted Cruz's party vote for their party regardless of absolutely anything (and most Democrats are like this too but in my experience that somewhat less loyal to their party).

In other words, none of Ted Cruz's voters are going to vote for the Democrat because Cruz didn't do anything on the border--or even if he broke every single other promise he ever made to his voters--because they've been trained to hate Democrats so much.

We're in a weird political world now where only negative campaigning matters anymore. It doesn't matter to the voter what their candidate does if they are convinced the other side is so terrible.

This is why Trump has recently ordered his party to refuse to vote on border legislation: he knows that his voters don't actually care about the border, they only care about what Trump says. And Biden would get a marginal boost for signing a compromise bill that actually improved things at the US border, and the top priority for the party is to get Trump elected in November, so Trump is against it.

We're in a very, very different realm of politics now, and you need to adjust your brain a lot to understand it. None of the old rules apply anymore .

Federal flat tax and sales tax are unconstitutional, except possibly for Fed Gov employees. They are a poll tax.

IRS tax is legal because it is by individual agreement between each person and the IRS. The agreement wording is so tricky that people don't even realize that they made an agreement with the IRS to be a taxpayer.

As in an idea with merit but probably won't happen.

Americans have no idea how much power they've given their executive branch over the last decades. The IRS is just a weaponization tool against the common working man. The elites will pay whoever they need to pay to work around the system because they can afford it.

It might be an exaggeration that "most" can't do basic math but for sure "many" can't. And when it comes to money and debt, there are some shitty business practices, like selling big items with a focus on monthly payments and not on the total cost. For example if you buy a car, all you'll ever hear (unless you specifically ask the right questions) at a dealership is your monthly loan or lease payment. "Just put your signature on this disclosure page, it's fine, don't worry about the $20k interest and $10k in dealership fees, the monthly payment is still what you wanted it to be, because we extended your loan to 8 years".

But all the sketchy-borderline-fraud salesmanship aside, at the root of it all is people not doing math, whether they're too stupid or too lazy.

Question. I have read in The United States personal debt can be a serious matter, and a very crippling problem for many people who live in debt. How realistically it would be to say it has something to do with the personal mathematical pro-efficiency such person has to manage numbers in general?
I ask because to me, money management in a personal level is just matter of adding basic income and subtracting the expenses, the needs and wants, etc.
Would not be unfair to say people cannot do math and hence become involved in a very serious debt?
If that was true then you would be implying a very important percentage of the people of the United States cannot do math to a basic level. I would like to think that is just rather a stereotype foreigners have on them. 

Ya, I'm sure they would still leave a standard deduction in there to help those with low incomes.  However, in order for something like this to realistically pass they'd also have to throw something in for rich folks.  At the very least they'd need to see assurances that the capital gains and dividends taxes would stay where they are as well as unrealized capital gains never being taxed.  So long as they did that, I don't think the rich would care what they do about income tax. 

"much more money" LOL

No, most people would have less money, some people would have slightly more, all other things being equal. Most people can't math though and live in debt up to their ears, so it's possible that most people could think they have more money because their favorite politician said so.

There is unregistered political party in Australia and one of its policies is to:

Expenditure tax, tax levied on the total consumption expenditure of an individual.
You go to the Shop, pay for the goods and your taxes are done. 'Only very few people are needed in Tax office.

India is considering changing to expenditure tax system.
https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/replacing-income-tax-with-expenditure-tax-is-the-blockbuster-reform-india-needs-in-budget-2022-4643621.html

Well. Actually, it is true people would not need to calculate anything on how much they are supposed to pay, that is true. But it would not be worth it, in my opinion, not in the long term. The goverment would need to print more banknotes than they initially planned, leading to a higher inflation, higher than expected by consumers and producers. Because of it, even if people managed to have more money, they would not keep it in the bank or in cash, they would try to out smart the inflation rise and putting their savings and assets into stocks, gold, or cryptocurrency, before inflation consumed all their value, that movement added to the printing of money by the government could easily make the United States Dollar to lose its credibility even among the people living there, it would mark the end of the American FIAT, in my opinion. And we all know that is not something which the Federal Reserve wants to happen in the United States.

It would be a very high price to pay for people not to ever to have to pay taxes again. It would be a complete overhaul of the system in that country.

About once every five years politicians talk about a "flat tax" because it sounds so cool. Then when they go to implement it they say that they'll have a flat tax... except for this ONE THING that they say "everybody" really really must have. Only one thing!

And this one other thing, of course...

Then it evolves into the Steve Martin One Thing^TM speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSWBuZws30g

And then the politicians stop talking about a "flat tax".

by outlandish you mean "not a good idea" or "an idea with merit but probably wont happen"?

they should be held accountable for saying things and not following through. especially if they get into office. there should be a stiff penalty.

but people would keep all their money. imagine how much more money people would have in their bank accounts. plus no more complicated tax returns. priceless

Well. Money itself is supposed to be the representatiom of wealth created by the state or private companies, inflation starts to take place when there is even more money in circulation without the creation of more wealth in the nation. Deflation happens when more wealth is created and there is no printing of money for people to pay for the new products and services which got created.

The scenario you are putting on the table is valid, but not economically advisable. Printing more money without production would make people to suffer from inflationary trends. They would not pay their taxes, but the value of products and services would not be in control, all would increase of price in proportion to the needed budget for the public services and institutions to continue working as intended.

The United States is a country which tries to keep their annual inflation at 2%, printing more buck for them not to tax people would make inflation to go up way beyond those 2 percent.

Dont take everyone words that comes out do the politicians lips seriously when they are on their campaign canvassing for electorate support. Most of the promises they make they don't even have an already laid down plan to achieve those promises but they just made it anyway with the aim to capture the minds of the people to their side. In my country in the just concluded general election that was held, all the promises made by the sitting president right now it's quite the opposite we are getting on the economy.

If DeSantis was more aggressive at the beginning of his campaign, he would have been more successful. This came at the tail end when he knew it was a lost cause and was forced to say outlandish things as a last ditch effort.

Ted Cruz recited the same lines in 2016.

what's he going to replace it with? if he doesn't know then he's not serious. and i'm sure he doesn't know.

Does a president have the power to do something like that?

A flat tax could be a tiered tax to income levels though. And still be considered a simplification of the current tax system with all its loopholes and rules.

they can just print more of it. honestly. so i don't think that's a valid objection.

how about the government just print their own money instead of asking people to give them some of the money back that they printed? just don't print as much or print more so you can have what you need. but its kind of stupid to print more than you really should so that you have to make some complicated system of getting some of it back...i haven't really ever understood that.  

You would be impressed on how many of those non sense promises have the capacity to stay in the mins of some people in the United States and other countries, where people believe the president have the authority to change the system and the way taxes are collected.
Though, we should give some credit to De Santis, he did not specify what is the actual percentage he was going to use to tax all the people living in the United States, at first glance we could assume he would go for a low percentage which would benefit those who are millionaire and billionaire, but assuming he goes back into the race and wins by miracle he could put a high percentage on the table (like 30-40%) which would be catastrophic for those rich people and companies. And since it would be a flat percentage for all of them, he would not be breaking his campaign promise, technically.  
By the way, if Donald Trump wins I don't have any doubt in mind he is going to go with the clasical tax rates cuts for the rich, as he has already done in the past, probably the only promised he has held on. People are still waiting for the Southern border paid by Mexico.

This is not the first time Ron DeSantis has made such a statement about ditching an important agency of the government the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Politicians are always making some political statements that cannot be implemented. We also saw the current president of Argentina Javier Gerardo Milei promising to close the country's central bank and dollarise the second-largest economy in Latin America. We are still expecting him to implement these campaign promises. I am not a tax officer but I think a flat tax rate doesn't promote equity. I see this tax policy as a form of exploitation low low-income earners. I am glad that he dropped out of the presidential race because his policies look absurd.      

Maybe he thinks his voters are so stupid that they think he can pull that off. And yeah, that would mean, people could hide their money from government more efficiently. Some people might think that's a good idea, until that tax money is needed for public infrastructure and there's not enough of it. It also would ensure more corrupted politics.

I am thinking he wants to throw in impossible promises now just to get people talking about him, as he knows he stands no change, so he is getting every attention he can get.

Pretty much unlikely for that to happen, to be honest. Also, I thought De Santis was already out the race and fully endorsed Donald Trump? If I recall correctly, De Santis under-performed in Iowa and decided to drop out.

Assuming any presidential candidate said something like this, I would assume it is a empty promise from the let go, the government of the United States depends too much in its internal revenue, for it to ignore the taxes on the super rich and just make all taxes equal amount United States citizens.
It would be translated to an insane increase of the deficit and also the roof of the national debt would be needed to increase many more times for the country to avoid default. It is pure populism, and anyone with some experience in politics would realize it as soon as reading it on the news.

Are we even sure this is actual news, by the way?

https://news.bitcoin.com/desantis-vows-to-abolish-irs-advocates-flat-tax-in-presidential-bid-amidst-stiff-gop-competition/

On Jan. 4, 2024, Florida Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis articulated his desire to abolish the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He advocated for the adoption of a uniform rate flat tax for all U.S. residents. DeSantis declared to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday, “I would eliminate the IRS, have a single rate, and just do a flat tax.”

If he can get rid of the IRS does that mean people wouldn't need to pay taxes on Crypto? Who would hold them accountable? But these politicians always say BS like this but they never actually do it once they get into office. Hope this guy is different. I would vote for him if he's serious!

I mean doing just one of those two things would be an accomplishment but both? that's like too good to be true...