Me? Well, I don't know, I must go to a dictionary and learn what a crook is. I've never been a crook.
We must end the iniquitous multi-taxing of the same money. It is not right to tax people's incomes, then their savings on that income, to tax the movement of assets through capital gains tax, stamp duty and tax them again through inheritance tax if they have the audacity to die.
As Elisabeth Elliot points out, not even dying a martyr’s death is classified as extraordinary obedience when you are following a Savior who died on a cross. Suddenly a martyr’s death seems like normal obedience.
God forbid that the United Kingdom should take a lead and introduce a sensible tax system of its own which would probably comprise a very low level of corporation tax - tax on corporate profits - and perhaps a low level of corporate sales tax, because sales are where they are, and sales in this country are sales here, which we can tax here.
The Value-Added Tax, a sales tax that applies at every level of business transactions, is an easy tax for governments to collect, and a hard tax to evade.
I'm not a martyr, just a musician who dies for your sins. Oh, that's what a martyr is? Very well then, I am a martyr, if you insist.
I actually think the border tax - the concept of border tax is more of a trade issue than it is a - so when we talk about income coming in, I believe border tax in its form, if we use that, reciprocal tax is a tax that I really love because basically nobody can fight it.
People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I earned everything I've got.
The Value-Added Tax, a sales tax that applies at every level of business transactions, is an easy tax for governments to collect, and a hard tax to evade. So it makes the job of raising revenue easier. The revenues from the VAT can then be used to lower taxes on income and saving and investment. The Value-Added tax doesn't penalize work or saving; it's a tax on buying stuff.
The 9-9-9 plan would resuscitate this economy because it replaces the outdated tax code that allows politicians to pick winners and losers, and to provide favors in the form of tax breaks, special exemptions and loopholes. It simplifies the code dramatically: 9% business flat tax, 9% personal flat tax, 9% sales tax.
Anything to do with any new form of tax, like consumption tax in Japan, carbon tax in Australia, these are big issues that cannot be easily decided.
Even in a gleefully negative comic, there is optimism, although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope, a form of optimism. Really hokey I know, but it's true.
Through death you find yourself, because you no longer identify with form. You realize you are not the form with which you had identified neither the physical nor the psychological form of "me". That form goes. It dissolves and who you are beyond form emerges through the opening where that form was. One could almost say that every form of life obscures God.
I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.
I'll give you a simple formula for straightening out the problems of the United States. First, you tax the churches. You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings. You decriminalize all and tax them same way as you do alcohol. You decriminalize . You make gambling legal. That will put the budget back on the road to recovery, and you'll have plenty of tax revenue coming in for all of your social programs, and to run the army.
Basically the tax reform ideas are to clean up the tax system and to eliminate the loopholes that only very few make use of, to eliminate the possibility of people making millions of dollars every year and not paying any tax at all through oil depletion allowances and things like that.