What exemption? There is no personal exemption for sales tax. What you bought is either taxable or it isn't. You don't get to say "I don't have to pay tax on that YET because I am still below my exemption limit." You'll have to tell Customs about everything you bought (that was taxable) and pay that tax upon entry. Everything, even stuff that you didn't bring back with you. That book you bought and then left in the hotel for the next person: taxed. The gift you bought and gave to your host: taxable. The shirt that you bought that you threw away when it got stained at the party: taxable.

Right now if you've bring back less than a certain amount you don't pay anything and the customs process is simple. Make everything you buy while overseas taxable and it becomes a nightmare.

Yes, they do. Who said otherwise? You'll have to pay the sales tax on those, too.

It's not a global sales tax unless it applies to everything you buy anywhere on the globe.

Yes, I used just one example of how a global federal sales tax would be regressive. That's why everyone who proposes a federal sales tax tries to mitigate the problem by creating a refund for people below a certain income level. They've usually just claimed that the IRS will go away, and then they create a new system that will require the equivalent to the IRS to manage.

You weren't talking about an audit, you were talking about the normal tax process. At least I was. And how there will still need to be an IRS to deal with the "normal tax process" when everyone has to file for their free money. You can't get away from having a federal agency that deals with personal information to make sure everyone pays the taxes they are supposed to, and that people who aren't owed a rebate or refund don't simply raise their hands to get one.

Until next year, when the ones who suddenly find themselves in the new 1% have everything taken away from them and given to everyone else. As in, what do you do when the money you've just given away is gone and you need to do it again? Do you really imagine that those people who had no money will save whatever windfall they get by eating the rich for use over a long period of time? (And taking everything away from the 1% is as close to "eating the rich" as you can get without actually eating them.) The vacuum created by emptying out the 1% will create endless opportunities for the 5% to move up, creating the same 1% all over again.

I can think of no better incentive to be non-productive than to know that if you make the magic 1% level you'll have everything confiscated. No better way to destroy any idea of the "land of opportunity" than to reward the use of opportunity with total abject poverty. Well, no, I guess knowing that if you sit on your backside all day you'll get enough to live on is a pretty good incentive to not be productive, too.

I didn't say "win-win", just "win", in the context of the next sentence about our current president considering it more important to "win" against the awful rich people than to "win" in the goal of funding necessary government services. That's not true sarcasm, it's highlighting the use of taxes as a social engineering tool.

So then customs would go from a relatively inobtrusive process of listing things and not worrying about it unless you bring in more than X dollars of stuff, it will be a complete listing of everything you buy while outside the country, even things you do not bring back with you, and everyone having to pay something just to come home.

A massive expansion of ICE in addition to an expansion of the IRS.

It has nothing to do with just buying food etc tax free, it's the fact that a sales tax on the other things is still highly regressive. Adding a percentage to the cost of everything that isn't already sales-tax free for a poor person has much more impact on them than on the savage child-molesting rich folks this is intended to punish. A $5000 car that becomes $5500 with a ten percent sales tax is harder for a poor person to manage than a rich one.

It isn't an anal probing now, and you can't just have people say "yes" or "no" without some proof -- everyone would just say "yes" and they'd get the free money from the government. No audits, no compliance. That's why audits were started in the first place. That they are a wonderful tool to ensure compliance in other aspects of our interaction with government is just a happy side-effect.

Hardly. It would have to audit individuals to make sure they paid the sales tax (or what we now call a "use tax" that is the sales tax owed to the state you live in when you buy tax-free out of state) on that large ticket item they bought somewhere outside the US.

You would also have a HUGE number of people whose sole duty it is to audit the individual information that will be part of every "sales tax" system anyone proposes for the US: who gets the rebates? Everyone acknowledges that a "global sales tax" will be massively regressive unless you hand money out to the poor to cover the sales tax for them. Everyone who gets a rebate will have to file and the New IRS will have to work to catch the cheats. You can't just hand-wave that function away by saying 'everyone gets a rebate'. How do they know who to send checks to? There will have to be an annual filing from everyone who wants their check. That means audits, and that means that the IRS will still be a tool of the political party in power to coerce opponents into silence.

"Speaking as someone who wants to see the NSA dismantled, I hope these shooters died painfully if they were doing it as a political statement."
Yea and since both statements are pretty much crazy we can now dismiss you.

To hope for someone to die painfully in this case is unethical at best. These people had to be stopped. The best result would have been for no one to be injured but to seek others to die painfully is nothing but revenge and in this case unwarranted.

The federal tax system long ago ceased to be a way to simply fund the necessary government services and turned into a vehicle for large scale social engineering. Give tax breaks for things "we" want people to do, put more taxes on things "we" don't want them doing. When you look at the things "we" have decided to tax and not tax, you don't get a clear indication that "we" have everyone's improved standard of living in mind.

Yep. But as long as it prevents the successful from having an unhindered better standard of living than everyone else, it's a win. We have a president who admitted on national broadcast TV that he wanted to tax the rich not because it would increase the revenues to pay for government services -- in fact he admitted he knew it would decrease revenues overall -- but because it would be "fair". I.e., it would accomplish the social engineering goal he had for it while it was a step backwards for funding the government operations.

You mean the article that has the headline "One shot dead at Fort Meade after trying to enter NSA gate" and the second paragraph describing what happened says ""Shortly before 9:00 AM today, a vehicle containing two individuals attempted an unauthorized entry at a National Security Agency gate," (emphasis mine). That article?

While it may have been true that they were overall trying to get off the base, their attempt at entry to the NSA area is what got them shot at. It was "NSA police on the scene fired on the vehicle when it accelerated toward a police car,", i.e., using their vehicle as a weapon, that got them shot.

People who get lost trying to leave a military base (dressed in drag for some reason, it seems) should not ignore security when they approach a gate that has armed guards. That is, as another poster puts it, monumental stupid. And people who are just "lost" won't try to ram a police car just for fun.

It should be quite obvious to you what happens when we tax people on what they own. We already have this: it's called property (or school) tax. It's what causes people to sell their homes and move, because they can't afford to live there anymore. These are usually people in or near retirement. If you think it's OK to kick old people out of their homes-- because we all know, they're such drags on society-- then you can have your draconian property tax.

You still won't eat the rich, which is what you obviously really want.

If you think that Saddam or Bennito or Idi or Fidel thought they were doing the best for their people, you are sadly mistaken. They knew what they were doing, and they knew who the intended beneficiaries were.

I'm starting to think that having private citizens pay any tax directly to the federal government is a problem. It completely overrides their right to govern themselves at the state and local level. Because the federal government is entitled to so much of the people's wealth, it is given de facto power over everything. Disagree? Then ask why every state's drinking age is 21.

The government will happily give you an estimate. The real answer will come from the auctioneer when he sells off your house that the government has confiscated to pay off whatever taxes they think you owe on it. If he's good at his job and the right people show up, boy is your tax bill going to be huge. And if the government estimate of what it is worth is a bit too high, well, you'll get a bit of the money from the sale. Enough to rent someplace nice down by the tracks, probably. Enjoy what we let you have, Citizen.

Yes, the People through their elected representatives who write and pass the tax legislation. It's not like Joe Smith gets to decide that this year's salary is "not an earning" all on his own.

Except people who plan ahead for the future and save their money so they have something to live on when they retire. You screw over people who work hard and provide a good house and nice things for their family. When you tax what people own, you tax it this year, and then you tax it again next year, and then again next year... which pretty much screws EVERYONE -- except those who save nothing and live hand to mouth. And creates more of those as the guy who owns the nice house has to scrape up yet another federal tax to keep it, even if he's lost his job and has zero income.

Taxing ownership is a ruse to cover class envy, nothing more. Just how much of what people own should the government take away from them every year (in addition to the effects of inflation and depreciation that reduce the actual values)? Ten percent? Twelve? Just five?

Do you tax retirement plans that people haven't yet vested in, or haven't yet received? Who "owns" that money?

Do you target family farms for enforcement, so they have to come up with ten percent of the value of the farm every year in taxes? Do you care if that shuts them down because they've had to sell it off to pay the taxes?

Another voice telling people what they should and shouldn't buy. That house you bought ten years ago when you had that good job, and now you're unemployed and cannot afford the yearly federal "gurps" tax on it? You shouldn't have bought it. You don't deserve it if you can't afford to pay the taxes on it today. We know, you worked hard all your life and saved up to buy it, but we simply don't care. The fact that local property taxes can do that to someone is bad enough, you want to add a federal tax on top to make it happen sooner and more often?

And you want the IRS to have a record of every exchange of payment for goods or services? Every one? Not even the states currently have that, they get aggregate data from the sellers. Do you realize the size of the federal government system necessary to track and gather and manage all that data?

Hint: not everything you see on NCIS or CSI:Wherever actually works like it dos on TV.

It can definitely help to be able follow the trail after someone does something especially awful - sometimes bad guys actually have accomplices.

But more to the point in this case: reports are that the vehicle they used was stolen, along with its license plates.