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On the taxation front, I've pondered the idea of addressing the whole "fairness" issue. Do we need to specifically say that the tax burden should be borne by all citizens?

Picking up on the earlier theme (I think by Butch), I guess my idea would go something like this:


The sole purpose of tje government taxing it's citizenry is to provide funds for the its duties as expressly stated in The Constitution.Tax policy should never be used to reward or punish any group of citizens or any specific behavior. As all citizens derive benefit from the government's specific and limited functions, all should expect to share in the tax burden. Government shall endeavour to levy taxes that have the most minimal impact on individual citizens and the national economy as a whole, while raising only the necessary monies to fund the operation of the government.

Butch, let's not forget there are some areas that are a bit gray. For instance, our parks and forests. Article 4, Section 2 "expressly" states, "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States:" It doesn't do much good to have rules unless you can enforce them so paying for rangers, etc, would seem to be inherent. Some of this is done through user fees but lets not forget that the Constitution, in places, expressly requires Congress to oversee things while not expressly providing authority for funding. Just some food for thought.

I'll grant all of that. Great points. But isn't the Constitutionality more about the doing and less about the funding? Doesn't the House determine whether something should be funded based on whether they can Constitutionally be involved in something? The Constitution doesn't really talk about "funding" per se anyway...or maybe I'm missing something.

BP

Here's my latest iteration of a Tax and Spending Plank...based on different comments from different places, including here and the FB Group.


Thoughts?

Do we need to also offer the national sales tax as an either/or option with the flat tax? It's very popular, and unless we have a very good reason to take it off the table, then excluding it may hurt us with potential supporters.

I also like the idea of a flat tax, and the related idea of not using tax policy to favor certain groups and to push certain political goals (for instance, the home mortgage deduction to encourage home ownership, or the charitable gifts deduction). If a flat tax that was set based on, say, a Federal budget of 20% of GDP (which is a lot less than now, but still seems a huge percentage to me), and if the Federal budget was limited to this amount, there would be no room, nor any need, for the large number of deductions and loopholes that exist now.

That said, I am not sure it is realistic to go there directly. The recent discussions of eliminating most deductions while lowering tax rates seem more likely (if not very likely) to achieve some success. If we could shift to a relatively deduction-free (i.e., distortion-free) system with lower overall rates, it would be a smaller step to move away from a graduated income tax to a flat tax.