25% national sales tax would pay for universal health care, balance the budget and exempt most Americans from the income tax

[mawilson 2,133]

With all due respect, it is a bit hard to 'provide for the common defense' among other things we expect from the Federal government, without some sort of tax...

Well obviously.

I was just trying to explain to C. why the Constitution is an important document because he seems to think it's #######.

[Amby 490]

I don't see why people couldn't just use some sort of service like this http://www.noinsuranceclub.com/

A single plan is $480/yr for 12 office visits

A plan for a couple is $580/yr for 12 shared office visits

A family plan is $680/yr with 16 shared office visits

There's no co-pays. Obviously, there needs to be more physicians who offer this for it to work well, but I think it's a good idea for people who don't have health insurance.

Edited June 5, 2009 by Amby

[Texanadian 10]

With all due respect, it is a bit hard to 'provide for the common defense' among other things we expect from the Federal government, without some sort of tax...

The thread started out as an idea to add a flat 25% national sales tax. That works for the wealthy, but effectively cuts 25% of the spendable budgets of the overwhelming majority of US Citizens. Otherwise, it is a great plan!

The Constitutional arguments seem beside the point...

You and I both live in states that don't have state income taxes. We seem to do alright with it. Consider that federally, they bring in almost 3 trillion dollars. But only 1 trillion of that is from income tax. If we had the same budget we did 10 years ago, we could have no federal income tax. Things seemed pretty good 10 years ago to me. The federal government collects enough money in excise tax, foreign duty, gas tax, alcohol tax, cigarette tax, telephone and electric bill tax.

To look at the above the other way, instead of passing a huge stimulus bill which hasn't done all that much except anger people. We could have simply eliminated federal income taxes for 1 year. The cost of no income taxes isn't that much different from the stimulus (1 trillion no taxes vs 800 billion stimulus)

A reasonable defense could easily be payed for. Having military bases in over 100 countries as we do now is a miserably expensive way to fund defense.

I don't see how you can disregard the constitution. That's like overriding the Supreme Court. Does anybody remember that school that decided to change the value of pi to make it easier to calculate?

[ready4ONE 5,400]

I am not anti-constitution at all, I just think it is irrelevant to the point of using it to object to taxes.

As to military spending, we average 300 Billion a year in military project cost over runs! That is greater than the combined actual military spending of China, Russia, Britain and France combined.