One Dumb Idea

... after the next.

Republicans keep trying to move the Plutocracy Project along no matter what you or anybody else says.

Leigh McGowan

Because my entire income is Social Security, I don't pay income tax unless I work a regular job and earn an additional $15-20K per year. It would suck something awful if suddenly everything I buy goes up 30%.

I'd have no choice but to work just to try to stay even.

So let's take a look.

Currently, at $50,000 per year, about $14,500 goes to taxation - about $1200 per month.

• If your groceries run about $600.00 per month, you'll pay $780.00
• Instead of $250 per month for Gas & Lights, you'll pay $325.00
• Gasoline: Your 3-dollar gallon of gas goes down to $2.72 (no more DOT road tax), but then goes back up to $3.55 because of the new sales tax. At 1,000 miles per month, at 25 miles per gallon, at $3.55 per gallon, you're paying an extra $33 every month in taxes - and of course, we can absolutely count on the price of gas never going up, right?
• Buy a house at $300,000.00, and pay $390,000.00 - and then pay tax on top of the finance charges for the privilege of borrowing the money - plus you get to pay another $200,000 because you'll probably have to include that sales tax in your 30-year mortgage - which boosts those monthly payments by about $500
• Same with buying a car

And one of the kickers - if they wipe away the property taxes everybody pays on real estate, then the schools have practically no funding at all.

Add it all up, and you're paying more - at least $5,000 more per year. And that's just for the essentials of food, housing, and transportation.

So, staying with "just the essentials":

at $50,000, you'll pay about 39% of your income in taxes

at $100,000, you'll pay about 20% of your income in taxes

at $ 250,000, you'll pay about 8% of your income in taxes

This is nothing but a variation on "Flat Tax" - it's what dog-ass Republicans call "fair" - and I think we can count on the GOP to go back to the old bullshit of a flat tax, so they can pretend they're being reasonable.

But they're not. They're playing with the numbers, trying to set it up so they win either way.

With this "Value Added" shit, they win on percentages. With the "Flat Tax", they win on absolute dollars.

A progressive tax plan is what works. Everything the Republicans are proposing only works to put more yacht money in their pockets, while putting more debt, more hardship, and more misery on everybody else.