He's busted!!!  There ya go.....Socialism plain and simple. 

Not what our country has been about so why are we even thinking of voting this guy in! 

I disagree. Social Security something I d like to see done away with, and should not have been there in the first place.  Pyramid schemes are illegal why is this one ok?

I wouldn't say he is busted though... he has always been a socialist and hasn't ever done a good job hiding it.

The only thing about this that is news - is that he actually said it.  Which does make his integrity go up in my eyes.

I agree.  And further, Capitalism has thrived IN SPITE of some socialistic programs.  Those policies turned a recession into a decade long depression.  One might argue that imperialism (WWII) had more to do with saving capitalism than did any of the social programs - and be closer to the truth (It was not imperialism, but at least it got us out of the depression).

A flat tax isn't fair. The main justification for it is that the efficiency savings via it's simplicity outweigh the cost in 'fairness'. If you're poor, a far higher proportion of your income is being spent on necessities than if you're rich. Therefore, you have much less income that can go towards taxes. Why should you be taxed on your total income at the same rate as someone who is rich? Wouldn't fair mean taxing people on their ability to pay? So the poor person gets taxed based on their income after necessities, at the same rate as the rich person, for example (e.g. if hypothetically you needed $10k for necessities, and had on person on $15k, and another on $250k, it wouldn't be fair to tax them both at 40%, because while the rich person would still have $140k to spend, the poor person would be sitting on -$1k. That's before you even get into the main redistribution arguments of it being more desirable to reduce relative income inequality if there will be a minimal cost to total income (arising from the increased taxes on the rich).

Providing you don't allow a poverty trap to arise (where you earn less via work than on benefits), then you will typically be able to do better by working harder. You might not gain as much for each extra hour worked due to a tax rise (meaning you don't work as much due to valuing leisure the same as before and hence choosing that over the extra hour of work instead), but you still have some incentive to 'do better'.

What, making someone starve/go without a home(/insert other necessity here), so that they try and work more? What if they're already working as much as they can (without say damaging their health by working non-stop+getting little to no sleep)? How does it help them to have an incentive to become richer if they can't, and are forced into absolute property? That's the problem with such a fixed rate of tax, because most people (I'd hope) would see the government as having a duty of care to it's people such that if they are working as hard as they are physically capable of, they should be able to obtain the basic necessities of life. That's before you consider all the other impacts of such a scenario - that worker isn't able to obtain all the necessities by working, so what do they do? Well, they might turn to crime, and steal from others to try and survive. Even better, if they do that, and are arrested, they get sent to a jail where chances are they'd be provided with such necessities, so you then risk creating an incentive for people to get into jail, not earn any money(+cause damage to get in there), and a huge bill to see to them, meaning it costs society more than if they'd just given a small tax break. You have the issue of it being inherantly unfair to have a regressive tax which when looking at disposable incomes is what such a flat rate tax would be (i.e. it taxes the poor disproportionately more than the rich, rather than both equally). You then have other politicial considerations - the poor will always outnumber the rich (that is, 50% of wealth in any country will be held by less than 50% of it's population). Meanwhile, the poor have a vote. So, they're going to want to vote for the politician that will make life best for them typically. If one politician proposes taxing them below the poverty line, and another one proposes allowing them to survive with necessities, who do you think they'll vote for? That then means the politician advocating such an extreme flat tax approach has to try and persuade all the remaining people to vote for them, which will be a tough job to do if you don't have efficiency savings resulting in a significant boost to total income in the economy (which would thus increase the number of people made better off by the proposal), and if the tax is fundamentally unfair (such that many of the richer people won't agree with it even if they benefit from an increase in income).

It already does! Even if you had taxes on the rich at 90%, you'd still have an economic system that rewards hard work+success (since you'd get 10% of the reward). Also referring back to the previous example extreme, what is wrong with rewarding someone for working as much as they can by ensuring they can obtain all the necessities.

Because it is popular, same as to why recreational drugs like alcohol and tabacco are legal...

Like all pyramid schemes, this one doesn't actually WORK... this is why it is on the verge of total collapse.

Aren't you the least bit curious how someone in the Unted States can't survive without the government? We're not talking a couple percent of people (i.e. the severely disabled or something). We're talking 38% of the adult population who pay no taxes.

On what basis can you honestly say that they can't survive without being given money that was taken by force from people who work?

Personally, I'd like to see a consumption tax instead of an income tax.  We punish people for working which is ridiculous. We should be rewarding people for earning money and investing it. We should tax people when they spend it (a national sales tax for example).

I'd go for that too, but I don't believe we'll see it anytime soon. The left doesn't want fair or equal, the deck has to be stacked. The fair tax would give those poor people, the ones that somehow can't survive without the government payout, the opportunity to cut back on new TV's, a case of beer or bottle of Henessey each week. Humm unless that is their priority of course. As a person from humble beginnings (not that things are so wonderful now), my patients for freeloaders is wearing thin.

Gods, I wish we did this... it would lessen the costs of collecting taxes.

You could practically dissolve the IRS.

If the government had taxed the landlord the full amount of the rent increase of a few years ago, my income tax could have been nearly halved without any loss of money for the state!

(The rent is as high as tenants are willing to pay. If it were any higher, everyone would move, most likely to a place were rents as so low that there is no increase to tax away.)

 Ya...