I’m in favor of taxing certain foods at the same rate we tax beer, wine, booze and cigs. Lets start with greasy, fatty fast food then move onto sugary, obesity-causing junk food. Too effing bad if that what the poor and those with large broods feast upon. That’s what they get for being poor and fertile. Lets also tax the bejesus out of artery clogging, colon blocking, heart attack causing, carcinogenic red meats. While we’re at it, lets create state run stores for some of these unhealthly foods. We could have the State Meat Store for example which would have a monopoly on the meat trade. After consultation with, and approval by, the requisite ecclesiastical authorities, the stores could be strategically located for maximum inconvenience with hours to compound the difficulty of procuring the sinful commodities sold within. To dissuade carnivores from their unhealthy and morally repugnant habits, the stores could charge about 250% higher than a butcher across the Wyoming state line would charge for the same product. And of course, everything would need to sold in a frozen solid state to insure that you couldn’t go right home and slap your purchase on the grill. What say ye? Lets do it!

I know audience, it is hard to believe, but as early as it is the clowns have rallied out in the Obama circus. We’re to tax Mac’s and what not, ever see what our kids eat in the Federal lunch program? Which is no problem, kids need fat and amino acids to form their skulls full of mush. We’re all here aren’t we? I ate my share of mac and cheese, pizza, and the like.

Try to enforce it, the 2nd will save the 2nd helping. Bad idea to mess with food. The tax on food is regressive in Utah, but as a complete no load state, something has to give. Guess the folks of any means prefer to plant it on the absolute poor. That’s Spewtah. What can be said? We laugh in your general direction.

No use laughing at animals, the real humor is in hapless progressives there. The outrage, the humoring of it by local stooges, the political culture that buys it, f’in hilarious. As much fun as a DI outing.

Question: I know James makes a very decent salary as an engineer and lawyer, should we tax him to death, same with Cliff, he must have a pile of money from his Chinese exploitation days? Who knows what his compensation is now?… but like the administration, we would hope they would honor the Pledge to be transparent in ones dealings, as would be consistent with the example set by our Commander in Thief, our President, and somewhat rare change of underwear, beer rack, hose-in, yo anus.

Can you pay individual poor families food sales tax with the largess you clearly have if the worst occurs? As it is, the existing tax is so regressive, are you personally mitigating that now? We would all be so proud if you were.

In the case of a terrible republican scourge fleecing the Land of Zion further, would you volunteer to pay this punitive tax upon the least deserving? Even if they are 35 pounds overweight. Love you guys, and know you have it in you, cheers;
Mussolyon

Becky, it is interesting that in liberal Europe, they have many very regressive taxes such as the VAT, huge gasoline taxes, electricity taxes, TV tax, etc.

Also, the US income tax system is much more progressive than most of the world’s. Generally other countries don’t have the huge set of personal exemptions for each household member plus the standard deduction before you even start paying any tax.

So believe it or not, our tax system, even with the evil Bush tax cuts for the evil wealthy, is far more progressive than France, Germany, Scandanavia, etc.

U. Rico:

Un-flipping believable!!! Wow!! Just, wow!!!

But, then again, we are talking about Utah legislative wingnuts who cannot help but do their absolute best to out wingnut their own wingnut contemporaries!

Becky, which tax breaks do the rich get which are unavailable to the poor? In general, poor people don’t pay any income taxes at all because they are below even the lowest tax bracket after the personal expetions and standard deduction.

You people should be embarrassed for your venomous ingorance.

In 2009 the standard deduction is $11,340.
In 2009 the personal exeption is $3,650.
Ergo, a family of four would pay ZERO income tax at on their first 11,340 + (4 x 3,650) = $25,940 of income.

Zero income tax means zero, nada, zip.

In addition, this family of four could receive an Earned Income Tax Credit up to $5,028 which would offset their payroll taxes.

I think I have said three times now that taxing food is pretty stupid.

We do a lot of stupid things. We subsidize junk food but not healthy food.

We are about to impose a tax on insulin pumps and pacemankers.

You will never catch me saying that our tax doesn’t isn’t awful. But the reasons it is awful is not that we don’t have higher marginal tax rates. We already have higher marginal tax rates than most of the OECD.

I will say that we tax the wrong things (work, savings) and we don’t tax things we should (pollution).

I have previously gone into long explanations on this topic, which seems to have fallen on deaf ears by some.

And Becky, you have twice referred to rich man’s tax breaks which are not available to the tax-paying working poor. Can you give me some examples?

Brewski, What kind of howling do you think we’ll see when European style VAT taxes are dumped on the poor here? Canada is proposing a 12 % er. The HST, harmonized sales tax, that will be added to all retail, except food and baby clothes. Coffins and cremation as well, even the dead won’t get away clean.

Food in Canada is already twice what it is here, and you must know that food in Utah is the cheapest of any place I travel to in the US by far. The only reason food is cheap is that it is part of the Mormon mission. Once Mormons were gone then you could see the like of those that populated Park City descend on the poor with a proper vengeance. Can we tax those crappy art sales up there?

The sales tax on food is regressive, but the very least to be paid by a state that lives off the largess of others in the country. I don’t agree with it, but as we come to the reality of state fiscal collapse, more of this will be needed I fear. Failing the food tax, I propose then an increase in the state fuel tax, and property taxes, so as to hit the middle class hard. As the wealthy have the strings in their hands and won’t tax themselves, and no one can seem to make them, there is little else. This is probably because the wealthy are all safely elsewhere, at least financially.

We could also petition the Feds to make 215 and corridor 15 between Logan and Provo a toll road for all vehicles over 3000 lbs. There is a job creating bureaucracy if we ever needed one. You should all pay something for that road in Utah, because you sure didn’t pay squat for that infrastructure others paid to have built for you.

This is a good example of what scares me….trusting the clowns who gave us the mortgage interest deduction on second homes with designing a better health care system.

Point of fact: They’re not the same clowns. They’re whole new clowns. I feel the same way when a company fires one CEO and hires another, but surprise, surpise–sometimes the new CEO actually does a better job.

Of course, I could opportunize a bit and take your argument another direction. After all, the guys in government are the same clowns who designed the Constitution, who fought to free the colonies, who fought both for and against slavery, who ordered the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima, who regulated and de-regulated S&L, who used imminent domain to build the interstate highway complex and to bulldoze private homes to build a sports mall, and so on.

Gosh! I don’t get it! How do the very same people do so much right and so much wrong?

The distrust of government is tiring. It’s gonna be there. It’s gonna do stuff. You might as well stop whining. Sometimes it’s like you get on this site just to obtain an audience for your moaning.

The bottom line is that you don’t really have a point. You can fight a good numbers argument, but what’s you’re ultimate conclusion? That people getting taxed upwards of 50% on their dividends should get paid even MORE for doing nothing? Remember–these are dividends, not earnings. The earning was done by the workers. We could tax them 90% and dividends would still be free money.

Besides, you aren’t paying attention to the implications of your calculations. It’s so fun to be a family of 4 living off of $25,940/year, right? I know you know better than that. The exemptions and deductions exist largely because, considering the cruelty that families of 4 are actually expected to live on that kind of money (or less), it would be overbearing to expect them to pay taxes on top of being deprived. As with many other laws, tax code (at least in this instance) is designed in part to govern what our economy demands of people in relation to what we as a society can reasonably expect of them.

So I can agree with you that, technically, the poor get more tax breaks. In practice, however, the poor can’t utilize the tax breaks that are available to them. Tax breaks on second homes are designed for the rich because, despite having all the forms available to them, the poor aren’t going to ever have reason to fill them out.

These statistics are fascinating. Notice how the median income of the upper class increases significantly more than their median income. This indicates a dramatic increase in the wealth of a select few. Also, notice the growth of income in the bottom 90%. It is true, what Reaganomics says, about everyone becoming more wealthy if the wealthy become more wealthy. It is also true that the wealthy will increase their wealth more than the poor will–by quantity and percentage. Any tax breaks will necessarily reflect a greater quantity and percentage benefit to the rich than to the poor. Graduated taxes attempt to rectify that inequality.

There’s a systemic problem in all of this, though: you can’t tax the rich. Any tax that increases costs on the rich will increase costs on everyone else. Without a change in our economic system and the degree of control the People have over it, the middle-class will provide the primary sacrifice from which taxes are gleaned, by their own taxes and the supllementing of the upper-class’s income to pay for theirs. You can’t tax the rich; it’s cruel to tax the poor; so take the middle ground, and everyone’s happy! I hope the middle-class figures out that they’ve been betrayed by the system just as much as the lower-class has sometime soon.

(Note: Incidental taxes and tax burden dynamics are, of course, more complex than I have indicated; taxes are not ALWAYS passed on. By and large, however, they are, with the perceivable exception being when a business has been backed into a tax corner, so to speak. This, however, would likely only result in the business failing)

Dwight Sheldon Adams