Quote - Actually a flat tax of 16% or so would provide the same funding, hit everyone equally hard, and ensure that everyone had a stake in how the collected taxes were spent.  As long as a majority makes no contribution, but decides how to spend, we are headed for continued trouble.  I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged to those re-distributionists on this thread.

Yeah, there is a simple solution to every problem, simple and wrong. Obviously, a flat tax would not hit everyone equally hard, but what's the point in explaining? The only people who cannot see that simply don't want to.

As for Atlas Shrugged, sure, you have to give people incentive to be productive, but guess who the producers are?

Think of it this way, if the pharoahs of ancient Egypt had suggested their people build pyramids, but to only build the top of it and assume the base would take care of itself, there never would've been much in the way of pyramids.

The producers are the workers, the inventors, etc., not just the big money at the top. Investors play their very important role and nothing against that, but there has never been a successful, sustainable economy built from the top down. Never. I repeat, never.

And that is what the right has been claiming it has been doing for a very long time now. And in that time, the US has gone from the biggest creditor nation in the world to the biggest debtor nation in the world, with the greatest disparity in income between rich and poor in the world, with more folks incarcerated per capita than any other nation in the world, with infant mortality and preventable death among the highest in the industrialized world, with a health care system that increasingly provides poorer health care than the rest of the industrialized world, with average expected lifespan falling in respect to Europe and Asia, etc., etc., ad nauseum. And now this economic thing.

Phew! The success of the right has quite a stench to it, and as far as sparing anyone right- and left-wing conspiracies, the truth of the matter is that the real left (as opposed to modern Democrats who are almost universally afraid to be called "liberal") has rarely if ever truly run the US, and certainly not lately.