Don't forget the "Making work pay" tax credit (6.2% of income up to $400 for a single person). That makes the federal tax for this person $1085.

$1085 is 7% of the $15,600 income, so I was a little off.

In the US, anyone making a 5 dollar an hour wage that isn't somebody else's dependent doesn't pay any tax after deductions, credits, rebates, etc. If they have dependents, their tax liability is most likely negative (their tax return is more than their withholding amount, so they make money from the process). Also, if you're making minimum wage for any appreciable period of time, you're doing something wrong.

I think we agree in general. We're just not talking about the same thing. In Microsoft's case, Internet Explorer is an expense, not a product. Of course, it doesn't matter what it is because, as you said, Microsoft has quite a bit of wealth. Microsoft could probably give away their products for free for years without running out of money, but they don't because it wouldn't support their business.

Most companies aren't Microsoft. Most corporations are small businesses. 99-ish percent of businesses have fewer than 500 employees. Around 80% have fewer than 10 employees. In the case of the fewer-than-10-employee small business that I work in, prices are directly tied to expenses. Some things we do "for free" but really they are expenses that we incur in order to protect current business relationships or develop new ones (like IE for Microsoft). If we get taxed to the point that we can't make an amount of profit that is acceptable to us we will close up shop and go to work for one of those multinationals that find a way to avoid the expense that is tax liability.

What you say is approximately true, but it doesn't change the fact that the sale of products cover expenses, and in a relatively free market, a decrease in costs will generally result in a decrease in price. An increase in costs will usually result in an increase in price to a certain extent. The minute a product becomes unprofitable, the business wil stop making products. Marx's plan was to designate which products will be made without much regard to reality. That's not what I am talking about. I'm talking about how businesses are actually run.

A gigantic corporation with the resources to lower their tax liability (lower their expenses) will be able to sell products at lower prices than a smaller business without those resources. Corporate income tax is responsible for the competitive disadvantage of the smaller business.

Back to my original thesis: corporations don't pay taxes. Corporations balance the pressures of expenses and prices. Any tax they pay is payed at the expense of actual people, either their customers (by managing price) or their employees (by managing expenses). People pay taxes, businesses don't.

No, the big downside to corporate income tax at all is that corporations, factually, will never pay any tax, ever. They simply put the tax amount into their expense column and figure it into the prices of their products and/or services. When you buy the product or service, they collect the tax from you and pass it on to the government. Whether or not it offends our sense of justice, all taxes will always be paid by individual people at the consumer level. Let me re-iterate so that it is clear: A business will never pay any tax. The will simply pass on the expenses they incur (including taxes) to the consumer. Taxing business is a logical fallacy.

Actually, our representatives turn themselves into shills for corporate interests because they lack the integrity to say "sorry, protecting your business model isn't my job." Better yet, it's our fault for constantly turning more and more power over to the federal government and not paying attention to what they do with it. We also give corporations power over us by not taking responsibility for our own livelihoods. We demand low-risk, low-responsibility jobs and job security and guaranteed health care and retirement benefits, etc and now most of us CAN'T actually make a living on our own. We can only do the jobs prescribed to us by the corporations that employ us. What do you expect to happen when we actively give up responsibility for our lives to our employers and to our government?

What exactly about the fair tax do you feel is a bad idea?

Did anyone else actually try to picture that....actually hitting the jello with the meat. That would be really frustrating...

Can you please give some examples of the regulatory structures that have been dismantled over the last 30 years.

I agree. Pure democracy is nothing but two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. The trick is find the absolute minimum amount of government that maximizes individual liberty. At the end of the day, anything any government does will be forcing somebody against their will. Unfortunately this fact is conveniently forgotten or disregarded by most legislators.

And the biggest, most important point is that they all volunteered to be a part of the community. One of the major reasons all of the countries that have tried communism have become centrally controlled dictatorships is that they didn't make participation optional. The large group of people who didn't want anything to do with it had to be forced to participate which justified more power for the "organizers."

Communism, progressivism, conservatism, etc aren't problems by themselves. They become problems when the people believing in them feel they have the authority to force everyone else to participate.

I'm not sure I agree with you totally, but...

Right on. Leaning on IP isn't the way forward. We can't expect to be an entire nation full of "thinkers" with a "service economy" forever. You can't eat intellectual property. You can't live in it either. Ultimately we have to be able to create what we need or at least create what other people need.

I agree with you, except that progressivism is the root of the problem, or more precisely the type of people who are attracted to the power necessary to run a proper progressive society.

I have not repeated anything of the sort. Modern progressivism, at least as implemented by modern politicians a large portion of the time has little to do with freedom, equality and dignity of all men and women except in the ways that all men and women can be forcibly controlled to behave in the way that the oligarchs deem proper (destroying liberty for progressive ends is just as bad as destroying liberty for conservative ends).

I'm not saying that unchecked conservatism (or any other -ism) wouldn't eventually take us to the same place (just by a different path), but that fact is that progressivism runs the show here. Conservatism has been largely impotent.

We'll have to disagree on that though, because I think we're beating a dead horse at this point.

For the record, and to put us back into the context of the original thread, I am philosophically a libertarian and don't think that the federal government has any business running an education system. It's a conflict of interest.

Also....the reason the Democrats can't pass health care reform is that their proposals aren't health care reform. In fact, it's all secret. The "liberal elite" are not trying to reform health care, they are trying to grab power. And, though they haven't been able to pass it by the normal means, they are not content to let the democratic process prevail. Instead they are trying to find other means to pass it. The reason they haven't gotten it passed yet is that their whole elitist condescending attitude about it...they want the whole country to roll over and pass it (quickly now, quickly) without really knowing what is in it...is offensive to most people.

On the other hand, when the great so-called conservative president George Bush was in power for eight years, with a Republican Congress for part of that time, what did they do but pass largely progressive legislation (medicare drugs, education bill, foreign aid, economic stimulus, etc). So, to reverse your question: Are these the people to hold up to the progressives as rivals?

Again, though, you're talking about how the "conservatives" are doing this to the country. The Chinese system is the progressive dream, not the conservative dream. The progressives have been been driving us toward that cliff for the past 100 years, not the conservatives. The system of education that prevents an informed public is by progressive design (and what exactly is in the textbooks is irrelevant to the effectiveness of the design). The way I see it, conservatives come along and do something of significant effect every once in a while but have otherwise been largely impotent. On the whole, progressives have dominated policy and politics for a long time and are, at this very moment, attempting to set the table so that they will continue to dominate for decades to come.

How are "conservatives" dominating anything?