3. Eliminate interest. Money should reflect value. Money is the tool, not the master. That means that society gets to decide what society values and not money. Therefore, it should be obvious to all inhabitants that we do not value the property whereby a million dollars can easily produce $60,000.00 per year through literally no effort. It should enrage Americans that the rich make millions by doing nothing while the rest of us slave away at demeaning jobs for pocket change. This will have the extremely desirable property of allowing the poor to build wealth and also will make it harder for the rich to keep egregious amounts of it.
Interest is not some artificial construction of the monetary system - it is a certianity. It is an inescapable fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. You can't simply get rid of interest. You might be able to stop banks offering interest on money stored with them, but it would rear its head in other forms (like rising property prices).
4. Eliminate the war hawk stranglehold on the federal budget. Appoint someone with balls to clean up the obvious corruptions of the military complex, but make sure the livelihoods of people who depend on that income remains intact in some form. After all, this pointless hoarding, at its root, is because people feel insecure about their sustenance. Remove any doubt that it will be forthcoming. There's no need to perpetuate the cycle of pettiness.
Just because an orginisation is large does not make it corrupt.
5. Alter the legal definition of corporations. Currently, they enjoy the rights of individuals without any of the liability. It's incredible simple: either make them liable or limit their rights.
They do not. Corporations already have their own rights systems.
6. Wealth caps for all individuals and corporations.
That just wouldn't work. There are questions of who would set it, how non-monetary wealth would be valued, or what to do with extra income, etc.
7. Banking outlawed.
From reading this and your other posts, that only conclusion that I can come to is that you do not actually know what a bank is and does. I'm therefore going to ask you what you think a bank is and does.
A. Higher taxes on the rich would not be enough, even if they paid what you call "their fair share".
It would still contribute rather a lot though.
Nowhere near as much as you think. Consider
this]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom]this information from the UK. Consider the following table:
Taxpayer type | UK average | top 10% to 1% | top 1% to 0.1% | 0.1% and above |
Mean income | £24,769 | £49,960 | £155,832 | £780,043 |
Ratio of income to average income | 1 | 2.02 | 6.29 | 31.49 |
Ratio of income tax contributions to average income tax contributions | 1 | 3.07 | 9.56 | 42 |
As you can see, the richest already pay even more than their fair share.
B. These loopholes you speak of are deductibles. With enough deductibles, they can move to a lower tax bracket, which wouldn't exist in the first place if there was a flat income tax rate, or no income tax at all (just a sales/service tax). While I agree some of these deductibles are a load of bull, to remove all of them AND keep the taxes incredibly high on the rich would devastate a lot of charities that rely on their deductible donations.
They're not really. Loopholes are generally found by moving money around in really odd ways (putting it through certain skeleton companies or holding it in certain countries) decided by accountants in order to minimize the money you have to pay in tax. Exempting charities from taxes would be completely separate, surely.
Lots of people throw around the words "closes up tax loopholes" all the time, as if the current government is doing nothing of the sort. This is not the case. There are large numbers of very smart people, with years of education and even more years of experienced, who are working constantly to do exactly this.
I'm saying the tax code should be simple enough so that any exploits and/or outright cheating can be detected and dealt with accordingly. Right now, the tax code is thousands upon thousands of pages long, way too much to try and uphold every company and individual to. I say write a whole new, simplified tax code, then set a date to scrap the old system and set in place the new one. Some exploits are unavoidable, but don't get the idea that I think they should be able to do anything they want.
The tax code is conplicated because the economy is complicated. A tax scheme that is simplified for the sake of simplification would be even easier to get round and would hold less relevance to the economy.
It's probably complex because a simple tax code is very easy to dodge legally by, say, putting all your profits abroad into a tax haven or something.
No, they could probably prevent tax avoidance fairly easily (well, have the laws in place to do so, stopping it would take actual enforcement).
Tax avoidance is something that is bloody hard to stop people doing. If it was simple and easy to do, then governments would do it from the start, rather than risk losing votes by cutting spending.