Now over 3,000 Covid deaths per day

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It is not that simple. The basic items, like food and medication should not be subject to sales tax. On the other hand, luxury items could be taxed at a higher level than ordinary items. A car and a yacht could be taxed differently. That would take care of the regressive part.

Since there are items which benefit everyone, and which are necessary, some kind of taxation is logical and rational. Uniform legal system with uniform enforcement, some level of national protection, and a few more things. Of course the only truly fair systems is voluntary. It could be a lottery based system. 😉

But if you are interested, read the book of Henry Hazlitt - titled “Economics in one lesson”. It is written for laymen, and explains everything in simple terms.
 
When I lived in Wyoming, it used to not have tax on food…then, it changed…sigh… they still have no state tax. It shocked us a bit though we knew it would happen, when we moved to Colorado. My bigger shock came when I retired and started collecting SS and it’s taxed…that really hurts!
 
Balto1 said:
LeafByNiggle explained it well.
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But left out a few key features.
First, the sales tax is on new goods, so anything at a second hand store or a used car lot is exempt.
Also, the tax provides a prebate for basic necessities so that the poor are not burdened any more than others.
 
I am all for a more equitable system, as well.

I believe unregulated capitalism is causing the problems. These giant monopolized corporations, such as Microsoft and Amazon, have become the world dominatrix now. Remember when the US government ended Bell’s monopoly? Why aren’t they doing that now? The monopolies have become so large, that they now essentially ARE the global government. The cantillion effect (caused by the inflation and the fiat dollar) have also created this giant unequalty of income.

I dont want to enter in to a back and forth discussion, I only wanted to bring that thought to the table here.
 
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CradleRC58 said:
Anything short of a martial law style lockdown in every major city, this country is going to be brought to its knees.

This pandemic is going to hand China the world on a silver platter.
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A large portion of this country has already been brought to it’s knees. Some are more insulated from the problem than others, and most of these fat and happies are baby-boomers at the top of the ponzi scheme; people who bought into the system early and are able to ride out their inflated loans and inflated stock market or government retirements. No need to question the system, everything is fine for them, they can quarantine all they want and sit from their high horse judging others who are scraping by trying to find a job to feed their families and save their crumbling mom and pop’s (another name for a small business).
Choose your poison; economically? (food lines are sky-rocketing) or via pandemic sickness? (I suppose overall death rate is not sky-rocketing, but that’s obviously up for debate). Our family has been forced to drink both poisons, and it has left a very bitter taste in my mouth.

And CradleRC,
I’m afraid Amazon has already handed the world to China on a silver platter.
 
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Petra202 said:
You talking about where government gets money?
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Crooked people (Nixon) within US government eliminated the gold standard. This no longer gives The People a fair shot at their pursuits. The system is shot because the dollar is crooked. Our system of trade is no longer a trusted and fair system. Balto is correct, loans are basically fake money that the Federal Reserve allows banks to create and loan to people. Our money is not really representative of goods and services anymore. When you trade in your poker chips at the end of the game, you are given different colored poker chips. And your choices to spend them on are pretty much limited to the Peter Piper toy booth. The person controlling the toy booth wins. This is the result of unleashed capitalism and tech monopolies. Believe me, a traditional right vs. Left debate on a plan of taxing ain’t gonna solve this problem.

Do you understand our national debt? It’s OUR debt. Not the government’s. And the people at the bottom are paying for that debt right at this very moment. Their money isn’t worth a nickel, and neither is the $100 coffee table they go spend it on at Wal-Mart. We wind up with these Macmansions filled with a bunch of single thirty-somethings, their video games, and a bunch of plastic lawn chairs. Oh, and a load of student debt. The mirage of socialism starts to become extra shiny.

Ok my rant is over. :rolleyes:
 
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Daisy, I’m trying to figure out who you’re actually ranting against. One minute it’s the baby boomers who started saving their money in their 30’s to 40’s and now are able to reap the rewards of their investments, to the 30 somethings living in McMansions playing video games.

Our economy has had many ups and downs. My first home had a 14% interest rate loan on it. My current home is 3% and almost payed off. My first job payed 0.90$/hr. I retired at 40$/hr. I left Wyoming to move to Colorado when people were fleeing the state and just giving it back to the banks because they could only sell it for half of what was owed. Currently, we have a second home we rent that pays the mortgage on it and we pocket an extra 600$/month.

Nobody gave us anything. No inheritance. No lottery winnings. Just some self denial and time.

Big tech monopolies? Maybe Google with its search results could be considered monopolistic but Microsoft? What area are they monopolistic? Operating systems…no. iOS, MacOS, Android and Linux compete. Amazon? Alibaba has more customers…just not in the US. Apple? They sell a lot of phones but android holds its own. I’m always curious when people want to break up large tech companies, what do they want them broken into? It’s not so much that they’re monopolistic as they are just extremely high profits…and pay really high wages, too.

We are in a pandemic that isn’t going to last forever. The service industries have especially been hard hit. I’m not denying that. Anyone that acts like the initial shutdown was the sole blame is denying the reality of people weren’t going to go there during a pandemic anyway. They are industries that just don’t survive well in pandemics. Even if we pretended that Covid was over, people aren’t quite ready to fully engage the public yet any more than they have to. There’s no way I’m going to eat inside a restaurant or go to the movies yet and there are millions like me. This, too, shall pass…with time.
 
I’m not ranting against a particular group of people. Im upset with our system of economics here in the USA. Its unfair. Our system of loans and our currency situation is unfair.

A good example of this unfairness is demonstrated in the cost of homes. The cost of homes in 2020 was eleven times the cost of individual median income. Compare this to a home in 1985 being only three times the cost of individual median income. That’s what I mean when I say people from earlier generations have had an unfair advantage. They’ve had the opportunity to buy into the market at an earlier stage of inflation. The other disadvantage is the level of quality of goods and services. Products and selection are limited, cheaply made, and at higher costs when compared to products from 30 and 40 years ago. Think about that lime green dishwasher that just won’t go away, or those ugly southwestern side tables from the 80s that were built like a rock. Think about food costs, or even the price of a movie ticket.

While these costs have risen sharply from 1985 to 2020, annual individual median has only risen about 5000 dollars:
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Notice in the chart that household income has had to rise with inflation; households are smaller, and the number of incomes coming in to support one household has increased as compared to earlier decades.
 
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Btw hope you enjoyed that sweet potato casserole recipe, Patty. 😉
 
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in 1985 weren’t the interest rates around 13%? That is probably part of why house prices have gone up. Cheap loans since then, everyone involved telling people to pay more than was really reasonable because hey, you can deduct it from your taxes, egos of both buyers and seller, etc, are additional factors
 
I definitely agree that the economy has overall become more inequitable. The ratio of CEO salaries to average workers at their companies has exploded beyond all reason. The wealth gaps have become absurd. I’m just not sure blaming any generation is productive nor will it solve any problems at this point. I’m too economically illiterate to offer solutions. That’s why when someone mentions completely changing our current tax structure, I’m curious as to the pros and cons…they all seem to have them.

We’re currently in a long period of very low interest rates. I have seen how this has effected borrowing habits and credit card usage. Back when interest rates were very high, the cost of a car or home were low but the payments were painful when paid over time as it added so much cost. We never bought a new car because even with the typical three year loan at the time, the payments were unacceptable to our budget. It seems that every situation through the years have had winners and losers and no one was ever happy with things during each of them.

I’m a baby boomer but went back to college to get a degree that I knew would lead to a good paying job. I was very late in starting to save for retirement so I was putting a large part of my earnings into retirement accounts. My job started with a pension system and four years later, they eliminated it and shifted us over to personal investments with a little matching percent. When the market crashed in 2008, it wiped out over a third of my investments…setting my retirement plans back by five years just to get back on track. I had to up the percentage withheld even more to help make up for it. We took no vacations or major expenditures for years! But the CEOs still had their rising pay and perks and umbrella retirement packages. I don’t object to the top brass making lots of money but I do object to how unfair it became…insulting even!

I understand the pain of the younger generations…my children are trapped in it. I’m hoping it will better for my grandkids who will enter the economic world in five to ten years. I doubt I’ll be able to leave them much to help out either. Once you are no longer earning money, you’re totally dependent on what you saved to last.
 
Pattylt said:
I’m just not sure blaming any generation is productive nor will it solve any problems at this point
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I’m guessing my tone came across as putting down certain generations, ie usng the word “fat and happy”. Im just saying its easy to judge, and not to question the overall situation when say, my neck of the woods is just dandy.

You also bring up college. College tuition is another area where loans have allowed tuition to skyrocket. Perhaps 20 times from when you went to college, which have put later generations at an extreme disadvantage. The quality of education has also suffered, as well
 
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Oh, I question things plenty! Always have. When I was younger, I looked at my parents generation as first, they survived WW2 and then had a booming economy where a man made enough to raise a family without his wife working, buy homes that were low cost often with GI bills to help and the US was an industrial powerhouse where even low educated people worked well paying jobs in factories…enough to send their kids to college. It probably wasn’t nearly as easy as I pictured it. Just as the baby boomers didn’t have it easy, either. Nor do the millennials or Gen X…etc. Taxes have been all over the place, too. Corporate tax has been both high and low and middle class taxes have been, too. When all the uproar started with welfare benefits ending to be reduced, somehow business welfare was never mentioned. I remember farmers losing their farms in droves and the rise of corporate farming. Looking back, our economy has always been in flux, benefiting one group and then another. Perhaps it’s time to start benefiting those hurting the most right now? I’m in agreement with that idea even though I have no idea how would it would look. We are in a period where the issue of raising anyone’s taxes by a penny seems to bring out the Taxing the Wealthy isn’t the answer!
 
Pattylt said:
Looking back, our economy has always been in flux, benefiting one group and then another. Perhaps it’s time to start benefiting those hurting the most right now?
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The very, very rich have learned the value of borrowed money. Their debt “income” has made them rich and allowed them to skip on taxes. They’ve realized you don’t have to pay taxes on debt. Do you remember when we found out Trump paid very few taxes? He learned the value of debt, and used it to his advantage.

Your generation has had the opportunity to refinance and watch your assets grow in value, with the added advantage of taking out multiple loans to buy 2 and 3 homes, while younger generations can’t even qualify to afford one home in a very small pool of homes left over. They therefore are forced to pay hugely inflated rents, without the benefit of growing equity.

The only way we can benefit everyone equally, and not necessarily “benefit those who are hurting most right now”, but give them a fair shake, is to stop the loaning of fake money. Remember at the start, when I said that the Federal Reserve allows banks to create money themselves by the loans they approve? In other words, money is created out of thin air when a loan is given. If they approve you a loan for 300,000, that money came out of thin air. This is absolutely wrong, and terribly unfair to all of the people who work 9-5’s producing day-in and day-out.

But what happens when the banks stop loaning? It’s awful. We experienced a touch of this in 2009 and 2010. That’s when the economy contracted. But if we want everyone to have a fair shake, its what’s going to have to happen. It will inevitably happen. For instance, the value of those 2nd and 3rd homes that you own will crash to the value of what they are truly worth, and things will begin to equalize again.
 
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If a house is your goal, do not do anything that takes away from getting there. Rent a smaller place. Watch every frugal youtube channel you can find and do what they tell you. Put every penny aside until you have enough for a down payment on a shack. Fix up that shack. make it into what you want.

Do what many of us who did not grow up middle class, who ate meat once a week or less, had oleo instead of margarine or butter (oleo made no pretense at tasting or looking like butter other than being in a stick and wrapped in wax paper), blah, blah blah.

Or to paraphrase the title of a song from my youth reminds me, No one ever promised me a rose garden (which in my case, since I’m allergic to roses, isn’t a bad thing 🙂 )

And actually, when you put money in a savings account, the bank then loans that out to other people. The money they charge for lending it is how they pay you interest. So put your money into a credit union that is local to your area. They generally keep the money in your community. And will be more likely to lend to you with favorable rates when you get ready to buy that home with all the money you saved from seeing how much fun you could have being frugal.
 
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Yes, Sally, and as Catholics, we are the “elites” who ultimately know the secrets of true value. 😉 Come Lord Jesus, Come!
 
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