Smarty, where are these exemptions and exceptions coming from? None of the candidates have actually proposed them, so far as I am aware. They have merely proposed a simple, flat tax. Until they actually suggest some of these exemptions, I think I'm perfectly justified in calling their proposed flat tax systems callous.
Besides, based on what you just said a couple of posts up, I wouldn't have thought you'd even
want such exemptions in there:
I find it funny that you suggested "giving them tax credits". The main purpose Cain had for suggesting the 9-9-9 plan (besides trying to become the president) is that he believes that the 9-9-9 plan would simplify the tax code. If you start filling the new code with tax credits, then you will no longer be simplifing the tax code.
If the overriding goal is simplicity, then it's hypocritical to propose exceptions. If you start filling the tax plan with exceptions, that undermines the system's simplicity every bit as much as credits would.
It is actually incorrect to say that the rich provide jobs: by and large, they don't. Their
companies provide jobs. It's an important distinction, because corporations are taxed separately from the people who work for them (even the very rich people who work as the president or the CEO). So when you talk about raising personal income taxes or capital gains taxes on the rich, you're not actually talking about taxing job creators, because those aren't corporate taxes. If a rich person's taxes rise, that has absolutely no effect on his company's ability to hire people--the company, again, pays its taxes separately, and it's the company that hires people.
What's more, a company's money and a rich person's money are required to be separate. That is one of the most basic principles of corporate law. The whole idea behind a corporation is that it is a fictional person under the law, one that has its own money and is liable separately from its shareholders and directors. That's where
limited liability comes from. If a rich company owner commingles funds (that is, dips into company funds for his personal use, or dips into personal funds for company use), he opens himself up to something that is called
piercing the corporate veil. I won't go into too much more detail about it, but it's basically
very very bad.
So, in short: the only possible scenario in which a rich person's assets would have any relevance at all to his company's hiring decisions is one in which he has commingled personal and corporate funds and opened himself up to personal liability for every bad thing his company has ever done. Few rich people are desperate (to say nothing of stupid) enough to do this, so this is pretty rare.
I really don't see what you're trying to get at by saying that Venezuela pursues redistributive practices. So do Denmark and Norway, which (as I
explained earlier) enjoy stronger economies and a better average life expectancy than we do.
In fact, we apply redistributive principles here in the U.S. as well: the Earned Income Tax Credit is an example of a limited negative income tax. Research suggests that it
is beneficial, producing "substantial positive effects in inducing single parents to go to work." Because the EITC is tied to income from working, it does not diminish peoples' incentives to work.