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Your ideas about fair taxes are unworthy of so great a body of thought (think tank). There is no fair tax possible but what there is, is to collect for public use the part of the return on the natural resouces that speculators may be with-holding. I refer to particularly to the land values which landlords consider to be theirs and the ground rent that results but is often not collected.
Since the opportunity provided by these resources, is a gift of nature to all of us, when somebody does not share it but speculates in it until the price of the land resource (opportunity) goes up, then he should be paying for this privalege. The idea is not new. This is the only fair way to collect revenue instead of tax. Its effect would be to reduce the cost of using the land because speculation would no longer be worthwhile, and land would be more easily available for use or purchase for use. It also would morally return to the public purse that which is being taken from the public chance to produce.
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The writer provided this followup to his thoughts:
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Having read through the letters on the subject of Fair Tax, it seems to me that most of them are written by people who dont understand what macroeconomics is all about. Whilst I would agree that our present system of taxation needs to be changed, the various arguements given in the published letters are faulty because a) they accept that taxation on something is necessary and b)that the effects of the change in the tax structure can be forecast and will be an improvement.
In response to a) you already have my previous letter (yesterday) that there is a feature within our macroeconomic system that can be taxed, or to be more accurate its revenue can be benefically collected. The word "tax" implies it is a penality, and paying this revenue is in fact an incentive, I refer to ground rent on land and natural resources (or so called land-value taxation, LTV).
However it is point b) that I wish to place emphasis on here. In order to decide on how a (tax) change affects its performance, we need have a model of the macroeconomic system which is simple, easy to use and understand, comprehensive and acceptable to most of those involved. No such model exists today although there are possibilities. May I suggest that when discussing these tax changes that they be fed into a provisional model of the macroeconomy which your experts can run and about which you can report?
Then we will really understand what is implied by the fair tax or any other change to our system of social ecconomics.
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