Do you support a Flat Tax a Fair Tax or a Progressive Tax ?

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How is the minimum wage 'ridiculously high' 7.50 an hour is not really even enough to live on.

I wasn't trying to say minimum wages right now are ridiculously high, but I'm saying it would make sense to eliminate all corporate welfare and tax loopholes if minimum wages were to be kept from getting too high. btw I'm not from the states, I'm your neighbour up north. Our minimum wages are fine atm but if the NDP or liberals get into power again our minimum wages could get jacked up so if we want to keep them the way they are without giving too much power to big businesses we'll have to eliminate corporate welfare and tax loopholes.

Oh alright, that makes some amount of sense....besides most huge corporations do not need any kind of welfare or tax loopholes. But yeah it probably does work a little bit differently here.

Minimum wage isn't meant to be a living wage. High minimum wage increases unemployment and drives jobs overseas. I'd rather earn $5 or whatever an hour than nothing and be out of the job market.

I would support a lack of taxes and the governments of nations being required to make their own money by selling their services to the public voluntarily rather than compulsorily.

You can get someone in Banglidesh to work for a dollar an hour.

ruveyn

People making income near or below the poverty level are already "on the dole" as they currently pay no federal income tax. If you dish out a 30% sales tax on these people with no prebate, the minimum income will have to rise. These people are already living on the bare minimum in terms of rent, utility, and food expenses. Or do you want to force the poor to live in shanties and tent cities? They will have no other option.

2/3 of the jobs come from small and medium size firms.

ruveyn

Isn't meant to be a living wage? Holy s**t you are clueless.

Well supposedly their income would rise since there would be no more taxes on it but yes, I understand this would be a regressive tax. I would like to reiterate again, I would never support FairTax as it has been proposed. I don't like any tax so switching from an income to a consumption tax would isn't particularly better besides the fact it encourages saving and investing. What I don't understand about the whole prebate thing is if you're getting reimbursed for taxes you pay on essential goods and services, why tax them in the first place? I can only imagine the monstrous new bureaucracy this would create.

Did you mean it's not supposed to be a living wage as in the wage isn't supposed to be enough to cover the costs of living, or did you mean it isn't supposed to be something people live on for their entire lives since raises are to be expected after they get their foot in the door?

I see the good intentions behind it but $7.25 an hour can not under any measure be considered a living wage. If that was the intention, why not raise it to $15 an hour? We'd be better off without it, it's counter productive and shuts people out of the job market.

I think it's that if the minimum wage required of an employer to pay their workers is too high that they won't be able to hire enough workers. Now, employers like Wal-Mart abuse a low minimum wage by always under-staffing their stores and under-equipping their few employees. However, smaller businesses like mom & pop shops can only hire so many people with whatever net gain they make. If they are required to pay, say $40 dollars an hour (the amount my stepdad started off working for USBank at, which over the last few years has increased to about $70 an hour [he's a computer programmer with a degree in chemistry and physics along with decades of experience as a computer programmer of which he taught himself every programming language he knows, and for all that I would have against him from my past on a personal basis he is still extremely intelligent and knowledgeable when it comes to physics, chemistry, and computers] ), then such a shop would be able to pay perhaps one employee or two if they split their hours. Big businesses would be able to hire a fair bit more, such as Wal-Mart would probably be able to keep their current number of employees if they wanted to, but instead they'd probably reduce to having one person per ten departments, one on register, and one as AP armed with an M134 to protect the store as it begins to look like a slum.

Well, it depends on what we are doing. Are we redesigning the entire tax structure from the ground up? In that case I say eliminate income taxes altogether, and move to a value-added consumption tax.

In order to maintain some degree of progressivity, I would "zero-rate" the following supplies: wages (but not contractor's fees), groceries (but not convenience food or restaurant meals), rent, a household's principal residence (but not newly constructed residences), tuition, medical and dental expenses and insurance. Everything else gets taxed at sale, and collectors offset the taxes that they remit by input tax credits for what they have paid out to provide goods. An exemption can also be made for individuals and businesses selling below a certain threshold (say $25,000 per year) where collection would be more trouble than it's worth.

But if we are going to stick with income tax, then there is no question that progressive taxation is the preferable approach.

It is a basic rule of progressive taxation that, "It never hurts you to earn an extra dollar." You might be taxed at a higher percentage on the last dollar that you earned as opposed to the first dollar that you are earned. But you are still better off after earning that extra dollar. People are not "punished" for success, they are expected to provide a greater contribution because they have greater capacity.

So what exactly are people supposed to live on if not their income? don't shift the blame to people working minimum wage jobs blame the corporations that outsource most of the jobs.....As it stands now there are not even enough of those jobs for people let alone jobs that need more qualifications.

Yeah exactly because they are that desprate just for food let alone shelter......but does that help them? no, these corporations care more about exploiting those people and countries than it does about giving them oppurtunities.