Quote Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist View Post
As for paying for it, I rather like Milton Friedman's suggestion of a 50% flat tax on all income regardless of its source.
losing half my income so I can get an extra 15k a year is definitely not going to be helping me as a consumer. this seems like another scheme where the financially inept (earning less than 30k/year, net gain under your rules) are rewarded and the financially adept (earning greater than 30k/year, net loss under your rules) are punished. I would also like to point out that as awful and wasteful as the defense budget is this year, there's a lot of other pork that I would cut first. (not saying I wouldn't do some defense cuts, but they are lower down on the list)

I am also starting to question the underlying idea that people who trade their labor, rather than products directly, are at a disadvantage. Invariably, whoever I sell my labor to IS producing things and selling them (or a service, I suppose, that's just a less tangible "thing" to sell) so I am benefiting from their trading. The idea that I could produce a desirable product in the modern market, on my own, is rather farfetched, especially in the field I'm in. In order to sell goods, you will nearly always need lots of people working on them, and all the people in the company benefit from the consumption and sale of the goods they all work to produce. you also assume that a producer is always selling to an individual consumer, rather than other producers, which happens quite a bit. if one producer sells to another, does the seller have an advantage over the buyer?

thoughts?