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I agree with abolishing income tax, but I think it should be replaced with n additional 5% nationwide sales tax (on top of state taxation). That way government doesn't discourage businesses to hire here, and get a flat rate income where they basically get more money only when business is good, because people are spending more (so that government spending is based on national economics, just like it is for its citizens).

What kind of business school do you go to again?

Wow! Now you have asked a loaded question, but unfortunately you have gone off half-cocked . . .

You should have completed the question with asking the reader to provide an example of what the income tax should be replaced with. You can find my answer below;

1.) Scrap the IRS. Get rid of it and and the Income tax code, all ten – gazillion pages of it!

2.) Institute a Constitutional amendment for a nickel on the dollar earnings contribution – for every dollar earned a nickel is put into the national coffer, and there would be no ifs, ands, or buts . . . no matter who earned the dollar, a nickel would be contributed. No tax shelters, no tax exempt status for anyone or any businesses – this would include all the so-called non profit organizations that now exist.

Okay, STS, rip it apart. Show us all how unfair and unmanageable my idea would be. B)

I don't have a serious problem with a major overhaul of income taxes. I think it fair that we have some level of tax progressivity when doing so (because of the marginal utility gains of money which are much steeper at low incomes, it becomes an obvious utilitarian objection) but my personal preference is a negative income tax rather than a set of social welfare programmes or a major progressive income tax like we have now (NIT is a flat tax with a guarantee of minimal income, popularized by Milton Friedman in the 50s and 60s).

The one glaring problem I do have with this is that you're not discussing how to slice and cut the size of government down to the point where it could be funded by such a tax alone. You're basically blowing the deficit up to some absurd figure (it's about 6-8% of GDP now, you'd be at 18%). Even the Fair Tax, which is fairly similar to what you're proposing except as a sales tax rather than income taxes, is at a rate around 23% rather than 5%. The reason it's so "high" is that you still have to attempt to fund existing government programmes which eat up around 23% of GDP. It's an attempt to be revenue neutral, which this would not be.

If you had combined this tax with cuts to existing government programmes like entitlements and defence spending on the order of 80-90% of current federal spending, or I had a pretty good idea that you're in favor of such cuts, I'd be (mostly) fine with it actually. So far as I can tell, you don't support cuts to most current spending in entitlements, in either social security or medicare/aid, and defence (this is important because those 3 eat up the overwhelming amount of government spending, with the service of interest on government debts right behind that), along with several other government programs that I don't support (high incarceration rates, drug war funding, intense border patrols, etc) which cost us real money too.

If you have in fact attacked these programs (you defended them every time I've attacked them), then fine. But until I see some evidence you're serious about trimming the size of government, the best you could do would be to change this to about two dimes instead of a nickel. At that point, no, I wouldn't have a serious problem with it. You cannot simply assume that, by some magical power, we would either a) fund everything we're doing still with only a quarter of the money we use to do so already or b) somehow stop funding a large quantity of things we're doing in an unspecified manner and for unspecified reasons and without specifying which things.

We need to stop punishing people for being sucessful. The income tax is unconstitutional.

One minor question here;

Do you base your income on your spending like government does?

Or do you base your spending on your income like we do here in the Dawg house?

The role of the government should be to spend only what you have, NOT on what you think you can take from the people like it does now.

Watch next Tuesday's election results and you just might see what the TEA parties have been all about – Taxed Enough Already!

Oh, and thank you for stepping up to the plate and showing all of us just how wrong the currant thinking about the IRS actually is. B)

The government already spends more than what it takes in, and with a brief exception during the Clinton era, has for decades. That problem isn't being resolved simply by saying that it should spend what it takes in and then reducing what it takes in on the assumption that spending will automatically decrease alongside it. This "starve the beast" strategy resulted in 3-4% of GDP deficits during the Reagan-Bush era, the largest peacetime deficits we've had had since WW2 until the last years of the Bush2 era (and now continuing under Obama). It would be nice to believe that goverments would, if their revenues were decreased, curtail spending. But they don't actually do this, and until they do, I'd like to see more effort on detailing how and what should be cut in order to believe that people are serious about making those cuts. (for ideas on how this works, see the fiscal austerity programme ongoing in the UK).

I'd have no problem with a government that could be paid for with a nickel of federal taxes personally. But so far I haven't seen any evidence that you could in fact support such a government, you seem quite fond of what it spends most of its money on. Until you address that as a problem, I still repeat the problem as : "WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO CUT?" and then show me how that reduces the size of government to a quarter of its current size. Because unless that's a clear path that we could agree to, with changes here and there, it's never actually going to happen. This is sadly not a magical happy land where we can wish it into being that the size and influence government would shrink and it does. Budgeting happens to be pretty hard not when you seek to tighten your belt and make do with less money/income/revenues because it requires that you look for ways to save money by not spending it. And this is no different for governments. In fact, because of interest groups that fight to protect spending programmes, it's even harder for governments to curtail spending.

As an related issue, I'll ask a substantive question: How's Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) look in your neck of the woods? The fact that he's generally not very popular among tea party types tells me that they're not serious (and neither are you) and are in fact just another meaningless partisan movement at best, or are at worst, a bunch of rubes being exploited.

I also don't see where I explained much of anything about the IRS or the current tax code itself, but if you want to give me credit for arguments I haven't made, fine. (It would not be very …taxing… to explain what's wrong with the current tax code and ways to simplify it).

Put a different way.

The government is basically already spending most of its money on things you support it spending its money on, or at least have defending spending money on whenever I've proposed slashing spending on them. So yes, you are "taxed enough already" to pay for …most of that (not all). I don't think you are serious enough about cutting the size of government down to state that your taxes could be cut by 3/4, or even maybe even 1/4 and still provide a government that does everything you want it to do. Prove me wrong on that point, that you actually want to cut or even reduce any major programs from the budget, and your budgeting complaint (or that of the tea party types in general) would start making more sense. Because unlike households, governments can issue bonds or raise (and sometimes cut) taxes to raise more revenues a lot easier than households can increase their incomes to compensate for higher spending demands. It is easily run a lot more like a corporation than a household.