Reply #1: Rick Perry’s Flat Tax Plan: Not A Flat Tax

[sonias]

Talking Points Memo 10/26/11
Rick Perry’s Flat Tax Plan: Not A Flat Tax

It turns out Perry’s plan isn’t flat, doesn’t eliminate the current tax code, as many conservative elites claim to want, and would likely blow a huge hole in the federal budget.

Perry’s plan doesn’t scrap existing tax law altogether, but rather creates a new, parallel tax code that taxes individual and corporate income at 20 percent. Investment income would go untaxed. Every tax payer would have a choice between staying in the current system, or transferring over to the new one. But as Michael Linden, a tax expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, points out, the new, simpler, alternative code would constitute a tax increase for most Americans and a huge tax cut for wealthy Americans, creating incentives for a small well-to-do sliver of the country to make the switch, and for everyone else to stay put.

(snip)

“For most people who don’t have big capital gains and dividend income, they’re going to say in the current system,” Linden explained. “It’s not a flat tax.”

(snip)

“For very wealthy people who do have big capital gains and dividends — they’ll take the new one, but even that’s not really a flat tax. It’s 20 percent on ordinary income and zero percent on investment income.”

There’s another way to think about Perry’s vision, that helps explain why it would likely starve the government of revenue and either explode the deficit or require massive cuts in federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid and national defense.

Perry loves to talk about "class warfare" all the time, because at the heart of it he's leading the economic war for the rich. It is class warfare and the rich have been fighting it for centuries. They've learned to control the media and puppets like Perry to do their bidding. It's all about shifting more money to the rich and leaving more of the burden of the "social good" to the middle class and poor.

Man how I hate this slimy creep. :mad: