Monday, July 30, 2007
♂ Mike Gravel..
When I watched the CNN Youtube Democratic debate, I was impressed by one of the candidate Mike Gravel. I guess out of all the candidates on that program, only 2 people were truly honest. Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel.
One of the things that really caught my attention about Mike Gravel is his Taxation plan. To put it simply, he believed that people should not be taxed based on what they earned and worked hard for but on what they spend. Therefore, he proposed a fairtax program where the income tax is abolished and establishing a progressive national sales tax of 19-23% on new goods and services.
For compensation of necessities such as food, clothing, transportation; he is proposing a "prebate" to untax the lower income groups. This is done by calculating and projecting the costs of monthly necessities and sending cheques to the lower income households to compensate.
I liked the idea of abolishing income tax and establishing a national sales tax in place of it. However, the compensation for lower income groups has the potential to be corrupted by the individual households. I personally feel that establishing a tax-free status on government sold necessities would be more appropriate. As a socialist, I think the government should companies that manufacture and sell these necessary goods and services, which will be tax-free. This can extend to farms, clothing factories, transportation services and hospitals.
However, the idea of the government managing all these different companies would be a mammoth task. It may be possible for the government to instead sell government tax-free franchises to the public. However, in order to prevent a tiny group of individuals from controlling these tax-free necessities. A law should be passed that prohibits a single group or individual from owning more than 20% of the franchise. The management of the franchise should be rotated every 5 years and elected by the major franchise owners. In addition, as a franchise, these companies have to adhere to government standards and regulations to maintain their tax-free status. Moreover, the tax-free franchise status have a certain expiry period (maybe 10-20 years) after which the private franchise owners have to renew and purchase another period of tax-free status.
10:43 AM
