|
I'm a budget guy so I put the spending before the taxes and if the federal government were a size that it should be, in my mind, we wouldn't even be discussing which kind of tax system we would need because it could probably be conducted on user fees alone. But that's not the country we live in and if I had to pick, I'd favor taxing consumption rather than the income tax which penalizes savings and investment. It's inevitable, though, that they would all end up looking like the mess we have now because politicians like to use the tax code to spend money and to engineer certain outcomes. At the end of the day it's more important to reduce the size of government at which point how you tax becomes increasingly less important. If the money's there, they're going to spend it.
Writer and Cato Institute Budget Analyst, Tad DeHaven
Respond
|
