If Everybody Paid the Same

Was at the auto shop yesterday when I noticed two guys having a conversation. One was talking about who Liberals won't answer questions; they were going back and forth on the Zimmerman Martin altercation (they feel pretty sure he did something to provoke Zimmerman, but both more or less conceded that the Police had blown it). Then we moved on to more general stuff, and I asked one of them how he felt about Mitt Romney paying a 15% tax rate, lower than all of us.

He came back with how much is that in dollars, and I conceded that in dollars it was probably a lot more than we paid. His comeback was how is that fair. Why doesn't everybody pay the same? Not the same rate - the same amount of dollars. You take the budget each year and divide it up among the population and everybody owes that amount. I told him I didn't think that was practical - that there would be lots of people who couldn't afford that - he said that this would make people pay a lot more attention to what their money is being spent on. He also is upset that we give child credit - which he believes is a ploy to get more votes (all those kids remember that tax credit their parents got and vote Democratic. Are any of you voting Democratic out of gratitude that your parents got a tax credit?)

I'm not the best at responding off the cuff, particularly when it comes to numbers (because I am an numbers person, but I can't do figures in my head) The Population last year was approximately 312,602,730 people. The national budget was $3,728 billion. That works out to $11,925.00 per person. My taxes would go up a bit. We do have 5,502,000 families who make under $12,499 in the United States; and he did kind of make it clear he wanted everybody including kids to pay the same.

He wasn't a bad guy, he had just bought off on the tribal rhetoric of Conservatism. They were both overly concerned over losers who get on welfare and stay on welfare, even after I pointed out that most people get on welfare and then get off once they find new work. Somehow this new taxation strategy would fix that; what it would actually do is make live much easier for people who already have it pretty easy, and much much much harder on the working class.

Oh - and the kicker was he worked as a property appraiser for the city; assessing the amount of property taxes people need to pay.

Bryant