[Borodog]

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Boro, that's all well and good, but you're overlooking some stuff:
1. RP has said he wants to get rid of the 16th Amendment, which would necessarily involve getting rid of the corporate income tax too. Why are you including corporate IT receipts in your projections?

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Fine, include the corporate income tax, it's only like $0.4T, and still leaves the budget at 199X levels.

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2. Is your 1999 budget figure inflation-adjusted? If not, why not, other than to mislead people?

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How is this "misleading people"? The claim was that you could go back to 199X spending levels, not spending levels adjusted for the gigantic amount of money the Federal goverment has printed.

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3. All this talk about payroll taxes is a big off-topic. Does RP want to use payroll taxes for general government purposes? If not, then payroll taxes don't really matter to the larger picture (except to the extent that the government can't fund any deficits in SS or Medicare without the IT). If he does, then really all he wants to do is replace the income tax with the payroll tax, which is nothing to be lauded for.

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What are you talking about? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] Why would payroll taxes have to be used for "general government purposes"? Paul's plan is to save a trillion in *empire and pork*. Cutting the individual IT would pay for that. Period. All else could be left as is.

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4. Whatever other verbal gymnastics you want to go through, the unalterable fact is that less than $200 billion dollars was raised by the government other than through a tax on income. Another unalterable fact is that the US cannot even pay interest on its current debt with that amount, let alone do anything else, except for the payroll-funded stuff like SS.

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So you're just admitting that the plan that you actually have a problem with is not Paul's plan, but the plan that you "think" Pauls's plan SHOULD be, so that it can't work?

Brilliant.

Sometimes I have a lot of respect for you. This is not one of those times. This is pathetic.

Fact: Individual IT is only 40% of the Federal spending, that much could be saved in pork and empire without touching entitlement programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SS, returning the Federal budget to 199X levels, and the IRS could be abolished and the remaining taxes colleced via an overhauled, simplified tax code like some sort of flat or "fair" tax that Paul has said he would support if the IRS were abolished.

There is nothing implausible about Paul's plan. In fact it is the only politically feasible plan I know of to seriously attempt to reduce the size of government without throwing people who have become dependent out on the street.