Thursday, July 24, 2008

Tennessee's "basically harmless" tax collectors

Gov. Steve Beshear said a week ago he was open to eliminating Kentucky's income tax. Let's just hope he hasn't been talking to Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, whose Revenue Department has some incredibly bizarre tax collecting rituals in their no income tax state.

2 comments:

KY Curmudgeon said...

All Frankfort can talk about anymore is how to raise more taxes. (If Beshear eliminates the income tax I'll eat my hat.) Whose money are they talking about? It's not hard to see why no one talks about property rights anymore. Why does the State assume it has an inviolable right to the property of its citizens?

Hempy said...

Eliminate the income tax and replace it with a proportional tax on the movement of all moneys. That was the idea that Alexander Hamilton had.

It would function much like a toll tax on the movement of all monetary transactions, including the sale of stocks, bonds, payment of capital gains, dividends, estates, mortgage sales from one bank to another and the some $1.5 trillion a year that banks launder in illicit drug money.

In Federalist Paper 12, Hamilton wrote:

"The ability of a country to pay taxes must always be proportioned, in a great degree, to the quantity of money in circulation, and to the celerity with which it circulates."