Have the people who support this lost their minds?
Consumers know reorganizations sometimes fail. Issues concerning future availability of parts, resale value, and whether anyone will be around to honor their warranties will be considered by them before making a purchase from an automaker in bankruptcy reorganization.
Durable goods manufacturers cannot be operated successfully during bankruptcy reorganization.
Taxpayer money cannot bail out Detroit. Only consumer money, spent on the purchase of Detroit's vehicles, can bail them out. It appears way too late for that.
2) The huge overhead of cars made in the USA incurred from the income tax is removed, and "Detroit Iron" gets really cheap.
3) Replace the income tax with a consumption tax (don't whine about the poor - they'll get compensation for the basic necessities of life).
4) The prices of cars built in this country are taxed back up to where they used to be via the consumption tax.
5) People now have a whale of a lot more money by the amount of their income tax witholding. Some will buy a new car, and that will be more than there were before since they have all this extra money.
6) The cars _not_ built in this country, which were not experiencing the burden of paying US income tax, will not experience the lowering of their price.
7) The cars _not_ built in this country will then be taxed by the amount of the consumption tax.
8) The people that have decided to use their windfall $$$ from not paying income tax to buy a car are way more likely to buy Detroit Iron, since it's going to be waaaaay cheaper than the cars built other than in the USA.
Basically probably OK, but I easily found several errors, and there are probably more.
American Motors is listed as 1966-1987 and Rambler 1958-1969 but actually the company American Motors was formed by a merger of Nash and Hudson in 1954 and was the manufacturer of Rambler.
DeSoto was never a freestanding company, but instead was a brand of Chrysler Corp. Oldsmobile is listed as through 2004 but it ceased to exist as a company in... what, maybe 1915 when it went into GM.
Maxwell is listed through 1925, but at that point it was actually Maxwell-Chalmers, and was renamed Chrysler... two years after the company built the first Chrysler.
But anyway, your apparent point that failure of US automakers is nothing new is well proven.
Well, we just doubled the federal debt in the last 8 years with mere cuts in income taxes, so I suppose getting rid of income tax completely wil.... I know... it will produce more total tax revenue!!!! Ronald Reagan taken to the max!
Uh... do you realize that Detroit is losing money and therefor isn't paying any income tax?
This is cute. The government is broke and your solution is merely to the methods of collecting the same amount.
Wow. There's going to be a heck of a tax on Chevrolets, Fords, and Dodges built in Canada and Mexico! And no tax at all on Hondas, Toyotas, Nissans, and Subarus built in the US.
Interesting. Use CTRL-F to bring up the search, enter the year number, and see what car company was started up or went out of business that year. Real intersting.
A vast number of our current problems - housing boom followed by bust, the truck boom followed by bust, high gas prices (again followed by a huge drop, which isn't a problem of itself as much as it is indicative of other problems) - have been caused by government distortion of the markets. And your solution is to distort the markets more.
Who is we? Consumers have already shown what they want is cheaper better cars, which are built either overseas or in the US by
**efficient** US companies like Honda America, Toyota USA, etc.
After the government gave the bankers a trillion or more why shouldn't everyone line up for something? It's really how this country has worked for decades coming out in the open. If you want to be successful you have to use the government to your favor. Maybe it's only regulations that will cripple your competition. Maybe it's tax laws that force family businesses to sell out. There's all sorts of ways that companies get their success through government. It's just more out in the open now.
How do you propose to run the gov't at all without any taxes? Wanna go the Somalia route - no gov't at all? I imagine we can do that, but nobody would like it, I think.
Nice strawman. I said replace the _federal income tax_ with nothing. Without the federal income tax, federal government spending would have to be rolled back to something like level it was in the mid 1990s. The federal income tax is not the only federal tax. Before you lash out you might want to do a wee bit of basic research. Constitutionally limited government would be rather small and cheap to operate anyway.
As to your Somalia nonsense, first of all even if the federal government were eliminated entirely there would still be tons of government in the USA. City, county, and state. A far away central government trying to micromanage everything is a monumentally bad idea anyway. Secondly, Somalia starts to recover when there is no government, the problems are from those who are trying to impose one by force. In other words, the criminals who either create or eventually infest government. The people themselves get on quite well without some government parasites taking half of what they earn.
Why do you think not having a government that is trying to micromanage our lives is so scary? Would you kill your neighbor for his stuff if the government's police weren't around? I would think not. The criminals' behavior isn't much altered by the presence of the government's police either. It's really about how well the good people are knit together than about the government's cops. The more people are isolated and unable to act the easier the prey they become for the criminals. It doesn't matter how many cops are around because they can't be everywhere.
As to a country to be like from a standpoint of taxation and services I would chose lichtenstein. The ruling prince of Lichtenstein is on record as saying that a taxation rate of 6% is all that is needed to provide the basic services and anything more is tyrannical.
The problem with introducing a consumption tax and repealing the income tax is that in 5 years politicians will easily reintroduce the income tax, and we'll be socked with both of them.
It did, but debt increased much faster. If you want numbers, the debt was just about $5.8 trillion in 2000, is now over $10.6 trillion.
Yes, the economy has grown, but debt has grown faster. Our Debt-to-GDP ratio was about 0.6 in 2000, is now 0.93. That means our debt is now equal to 93% of our annual GDP.
And we continue to borrow money to try and stabilize a situation caused by borrowing too much money.
Surely we can borrow our way out of debt. Reaganomics says so.
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