486-Ignore the Republicans...What Do You Think Is the Right Approach To Income Taxation and Why?
Radical Personal Finance
Joshua J. Sheats, MSFS, CFP, CLU, ChFC, CASL, RHU, REBC, CAP
4.2 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2017
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
I feel like I owe it to you to keep you semi-current on the state of tax policy in the USA. But, it's too early to have any serious details about the current Republican proposals.
I thought instead we could have a useful philosophical discussion about taxation. My challenge to you today is to answer these questions, for yourself.
- Do you believe that a civil government has the moral right to tax an individual's income? Why or why not?
- Do you believe that the US civil government has the constitutional right to tax an individual's income?
- If you believe that a civil government does have this right, how much of a person's income can they claim? What's the right number and how would you know?
- Do you believe that everyone should be required to pay income taxes?
- Do you believe that some people should be treated differently than others and so be ordered to pay a different rate of income tax than others? Why or why not?
- If so, how would we determine who should be treated differently and how much of a difference there should be?
- Do you believe that government tax policy should be used to incentivize certain behaviors or to dis-incentivize other behaviors?
- If so, how would we know what behaviors should be incentivized and which ones shouldn't?
- Do you believe that tax policy should be used to give some people special benefits because of certain behaviors?
Joshua
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today is Thursday, September 28, 2017 and here in the United States of America, |
| 0:05.4 | President Trump and the Republican Party released or started the process of |
| 0:10.1 | releasing some of the information about their goals for tax reform. |
| 0:14.8 | Yesterday they released the document called a unified framework for fixing our broken tax code. |
| 0:20.8 | The idea is the headline on the slogan is tax reform more jobs fair attacks is bigger paychecks |
| 0:25.8 | because I deal with personal finance here on radical personal finance I feel like I owe it to you |
| 0:29.9 | to do a bit of analysis on the on this on some of these proposals. |
| 0:35.6 | I've done a lot of shows on detailed careful tax planning and I feel like I owe it to you |
| 0:40.6 | to give you some commentary and some analysis and I want to do that. |
| 0:45.6 | But I can't do that today for two reasons. |
| 0:48.8 | One, it is far too early to have any clarity on specific proposals. |
| 0:56.1 | This, of course, doesn't stop the commentariat |
| 0:58.6 | from quickly talking about how it's either a great plan |
| 1:02.1 | or a terrible plan, but it's far too early to have any specific |
| 1:06.7 | proposals at this point in the legislative process things will go into committee, they need to be debate, all kinds of things. |
| 1:13.0 | And so it's just not, there's not enough information where I could properly comment on it |
| 1:18.9 | with any kind of clarity or accuracy. |
| 1:21.8 | Number two reason is just simply this subject and the way that |
| 1:24.1 | this subject is handled utterly depresses me. This morning I worked through and I |
| 1:29.0 | said okay well let me go and start reading some of the analysis some of the |
| 1:32.1 | news from people that I appreciate |
| 1:34.7 | and people that are popular in the in the press and I find the whole thing utterly depressing. Now I promise I'm not going to depress you in this show. |
... |
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