IRS kills off PINs citing increasing suspicious activity America's Internal Revenue Service has brought forward the discontinuation of the electronic filing PIN that was supposed to protect customers. After an embarrassing security breach in February of this year, it issued PINs to millions of Americans to try and protect what secrets they still had. That program was suspended in …
You must not be familiar with t America legal system. Not state would go for a national VAT. States,counties and cites all can charge taxes. Getting them to give that money up and sending it to the feds will never happen. In fact Russia would ask to become part of the USA before that would happen.
You must not be familiar with t America legal system. Not state would go for a national VAT. States,counties and cites all can charge taxes. Getting them to give that money up and sending it to the feds will never happen. In fact Russia would ask to become part of the USA before that would happen.
Things are much worse than you portray. Firstly, the US Constitution requires that all taxes "...shall be uniform throughout the United States" (Article 1, Section 8). The 16th Amendment removed this restriction for the purpose of taxes on income, but not taxes on consumption. So, a VAT is a non-starter without another Constitutional amendment and that isn't likely to happen ever (as you did note correctly).
Secondly, the chief problem with a VAT is that it would burden those who could scarcely afford it, i.e. the bottom 40% of the income scale. Part of that could be solved by providing exclusions for "essential" products or services, like groceries, medical care, etc Or the Feds could implement a Universal Basic Income for this purpose. Of course, any of these "fixes" introduce their own problems and frankly put the system back on a path to support further crony capitalism.
Any attempt to fix how the US raises revenues has to address not just a simplification of the collection method, but also a simplification of government largesse. That's not some right wing code for stopping welfare, benefits-in-kind, or other subsidies, but it does mean that there's huge swathes of the US government that simply exist to support cronies and not the people at large. Shrinking the Federal footprint and consolidating the tax code is really the only way to make this happen. Even then, getting agreement on that is virtually impossible.
No, you really don't want that bunch to "simply" anything. Anything they did with the idea of "simplifying" would just create a new, much worse monster. Remember, this is the FED you're talking about. I've seen lots of "improvements" and, yet, nothing has ever actually been improved, as far as I can tell.
If you ever hear "Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help," you need to run away as fast as you can.
Here's how * the flat tax would work. A simple 3x5 card form:
Name:
Address:
Telephone:
email:
1. How much did you make last year, including all forms of income?
2. send that in *
* only HALF joking because some politicians on both sides really would like to see that - if for no other reason than to torpedo such a common sense argument as "flat tax" or any other tax system that people can actually understand.
One thing's missing:
Our records show you made $123456 last year (details below)
[ ] This is correct or lower than your actual income. Please pay 10% ($12346) by April 15.
[ ] That's wrong. Please correct our mistakes below, and pay 10% minus 50% of the amount we overbilled by May 15.
Back during the early days when they called it Business Systems Modernization, there were a lot of concerns about using PINs for authentication. We had problems using the concept of shared secrets for the "where's my refund" functions. But they didn't listen to us. Every time we tried to discuss the problems the "business" always shot us down. It was too hard, they said. It would cause a lot of customer service calls, they added. In the mean time, we were trying to work with them to make sure the systems could not be attacked. We came up with limiting login tries, forms of identity proofing, and the like. But did the IRS management listen to us? Of course not. These "business" folks knew better.
Unfortunately, business does just as bad as the IRS. The difference is the level of press they get versus someone like Home Depot who has never been asked the fundamental questions. In comparison, what happened at Target and Home Depot is worse than what happened at the IRS. But why explain that to some people, including the idiots who turned this into a discussion about tax policy when it is a story on information security!
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