Agree? "An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator..."

I never believed in that myth, but it sure is handy, particularly when you are one of those rich “job creators”. I got tired of this never-ending crisis, of too much greed, too much stupid competition, when collaboration is obviously the best answer in these troubled economic times. We are going into deep recession (Portugal), however there are people making fortunes out of cents every single day, the “job creators”, with tax paradises. Nothing changed. Money or the rich job creators have the exact same behavior that brought us all to this never-ending hell. How can people not see? I joined forces with some people; we rolled back our sleeves and decided to collaborate. We wrote our code of ethics. We are going to work in collaboration, give before take. We all do the same; we all get work and business because we work with that mental frame. There was a time when Portugal had “progressive expenditure taxes”. These taxes have a similar progressive rate scale to the personal income tax, but the difference is that taxpayers receive a full deduction for any new investments they make, and the interest payments are tax-free until they are withdrawn for spending. The most detrimental economic effects of the tax system arise from the failure to tax different kinds of income consistently. Taxes have moderate influence on overall levels of investment/earnings, but they have a large effect on investment choice. Taxing different kinds of income more consistently improves equality and economic efficiency. High-income earners are not able to use loopholes in the system to reduce tax, which, in turn, would have less impact in investment decisions.

 

Alan J. Auerbach (University of California, Berkeley) states, "annual income is not an especially accurate measure of one's ability to pay. A household's consumption tends to fluctuate less from year to year than its income does, and in some respects offers a better measure of a family's sustainable standard of living. Tax reform proposals that transition from an income tax to a consumption tax would be more equitable because consumption requires a balance between known and complex social costs.”

 

Australia - “Progressive tax reform: Reform of the personal income tax system” (ACOSS Paper 158 | November 2009) states: There are four good reasons to reform the tax system:

1) To raise the public revenue needed to fund the services and income support needed by Australians as the population ages

2) To raise revenue more fairly than we do now, based on people’s ability to pay tax, not their ability to game the system

3) To make tax less of a factor in investment and workforce participation decisions

4) To create a system that people can understand and comply with