Originally posted by easytarget
You know you say that socialized medicine never works, but when you look at the charts... The U.S.A is ranked #45 in terms of life expectancy of all countries. We're behind countries like Jordan, war-torn Bosnia, and Singapore. Canadians live an average of almost 2 years longer than us, ranking 10th world-wide. Don't tell me that their health care system doesn't work when it's quantitatively better than ours.
And how is the fair tax not fair? There is no arguement there. People see the high tax rate and go OMG LOOK HOW MUCH U RAISE IT BY. But really, it saves you so much money because it does not tax anything you save. But, show me your numbers and ill show you mine.
~Easy
~Easy
First example is with the current system:
Let's say you're lower-middle class and you make $30,000/yr and sales tax where you live is 5% (at least that's what it is where I live), and for the sake of round numbers, let's say milk costs $4.00/gallon. (IRL it will fluctuate between about $3.60 and $4.20, sometimes spiking.) Therefore, milk now costs $4.20/gallon. If you make $30,000 you owe $4099 in income tax, so you took home $25,901. Now you buy 1 gallon of milk per week, 52 weeks/year. This works out to be $218.40, which is 0.843% of your income.
Now we're going to assume we're using the Fair Tax... According to their website, the Fair Tax should be set at 23%. This means milk is now like $4.92/gallon. You took home $30,000 this go around however, but you're still buying 1 gallon of milk/week x 52 months/year so you now spent $255.84 on milk. This is now .853% of your income, an increase from the previous system.
Now if you change the numbers here, somewhere around $35K the percentages even out, and then the higher you make after that, the less of a portion of your annual income this is, but the lower you go, the worse off you are and pretty soon milk becomes 1% of your income, at which point you probably will stop buying it. Now you're going to say that most families make over $35,000/yr (the point where both systems even out) anyway, so this shouldn't be a big deal. Well, yes most households do earn over $35,000/year, but 40% of families don't. Two fifths of American families would get shafted by this, and this is measured in households... If you went individually, it turns out that 56% of Americans as individuals don't make $35K/yr, so either way you are hurting a huge segment of the population.
And that's just milk. Forget about other staples like bread or gas or whatever. Whichever you choose it doesn't look pretty.
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