Quote Originally Posted by easytarget
Nat, socialized medicine has never worked, look at Canada. They come here for service because noone can get healthcare there. Government pays for it all but everyone goes to the doctor for the littlest thing and thus, there are terribly huge lines to get any attention so people are just fed up. They rather just go to the US and pay for it.
When was the last time you went to a hospital in Canada? Have you ever been to one? I had to go to the hospital one time when I was up there because I was violently ill. Since I'm a Canadian citizen as well as an American one, I get the same treatment there that Pasties or any other Canadian would get, and well let me tell you, it sucks to go to the hospital no matter where you live but in Canada they don't do all that insurance checking bullshit and don't try to see if you're even qualified to be treated. They just wanted proof that I was a Canadian citizen. Whereas in the U.S. when I went to the emergency room after breaking my ankle, I had to sit around in the lobby for an hour before they would even look at me because they had to process my health insurance info.
You know you say that socialized medicine never works, but when you look at the charts... The U.S.A is ranked #45 in terms of life expectancy of all countries. We're behind countries like Jordan, war-torn Bosnia, and Singapore. Canadians live an average of almost 2 years longer than us, ranking 10th world-wide. Don't tell me that their health care system doesn't work when it's quantitatively better than ours.


And how is the fair tax not fair? There is no arguement there. People see the high tax rate and go OMG LOOK HOW MUCH U RAISE IT BY. But really, it saves you so much money because it does not tax anything you save. But, show me your numbers and ill show you mine.

~Easy
This will take some time to explain, so bear with me. Fair tax is such that the richer you are, the better it is for you, while it hurts middle and lower-class people, who make up the majority of the population.

First example is with the current system:
Let's say you're lower-middle class and you make $30,000/yr and sales tax where you live is 5% (at least that's what it is where I live), and for the sake of round numbers, let's say milk costs $4.00/gallon. (IRL it will fluctuate between about $3.60 and $4.20, sometimes spiking.) Therefore, milk now costs $4.20/gallon. If you make $30,000 you owe $4099 in income tax, so you took home $25,901. Now you buy 1 gallon of milk per week, 52 weeks/year. This works out to be $218.40, which is 0.843% of your income.

Now we're going to assume we're using the Fair Tax... According to their website, the Fair Tax should be set at 23%. This means milk is now like $4.92/gallon. You took home $30,000 this go around however, but you're still buying 1 gallon of milk/week x 52 months/year so you now spent $255.84 on milk. This is now .853% of your income, an increase from the previous system.

Now if you change the numbers here, somewhere around $35K the percentages even out, and then the higher you make after that, the less of a portion of your annual income this is, but the lower you go, the worse off you are and pretty soon milk becomes 1% of your income, at which point you probably will stop buying it. Now you're going to say that most families make over $35,000/yr (the point where both systems even out) anyway, so this shouldn't be a big deal. Well, yes most households do earn over $35,000/year, but 40% of families don't. Two fifths of American families would get shafted by this, and this is measured in households... If you went individually, it turns out that 56% of Americans as individuals don't make $35K/yr, so either way you are hurting a huge segment of the population.

And that's just milk. Forget about other staples like bread or gas or whatever. Whichever you choose it doesn't look pretty.