The only fairtax is a flat tax without all the crap around it. The "prebate" is the most retarded thing I ever hear.
Fairtax is still progressive, those who pay nothing still get "refunds" blah blah .... pointless to switch to that, IMO.
But thats off topic.
0% taxes for everybody is a better idea, or at least as low as possible.
Cut the spending.
Not necessarily. The diminishing marginal utility of wealth provides a good philosophical foundation for a progressive income tax (keep in mind, it only provides an existence-type justification, it doesn't provide much help in determining
how progressive the income tax should be). To see this, consider Bill Gates, whom we'll assume earns $100 million/year, and Joe Shmo, whom we'll assume earns $30,000 a year. The utility of Bill Gates' 100 millionth dollar is, I think all will agree, substantially less than the utility of Joe's thirty thousandth dollar.
Now, if we add to our philosophical tools the rule that the distribution of the tax burden ought to cause as little pain as possible (which is different from something like distributing the burden on the basis of benefits received from the system, which just leads to indeterminacy), then we arrive at the conclusion that Bill Gates should be taxed more heavily than Joe Schmo because it causes Bill less pain than it does Joe.
If we push this to the extreme, however, we reach the point at which we might be inclined to say that Bill should be the only one taxed until the total tax burden has reached $99,970,000, at which point one is tempted to argue that Bill and Joe are now equal inasmuch as they arguably now have the same marginal utility.
However, the theoretical framework won't get us there, and reality will break it long before we even get close, because as we all know, Bill would start engaging in tax evasion long before he paid $99,970,000 in taxes (notwithstanding his liberal b.s.). So, in the absence of a theoretically satisfactory limit on the degree of progressivity, I would suggest the following empirical limit - progressivity should stop at or before the point at which high income earners begin to engage in tax evasion to any significant degree (and, by "tax evasion" here I would include such "innocuous" things as overstating your charitable contributions, your deductions, shaving a little bit off of cash receipts not subject to 1099 reporting, and the like, as well as the more classic forms of tax evasion).
So, without doing too much heavy-duty academic slogging, you can derive a reasonable argument in favor of a progressive income tax, and although you cannot
a priori what the maximally efficient rate of progressivity is, you can discover that limitation with a little trial and error. Most likely, you'd reach a degree of progressivity that is reasonably close to what we have right now (i.e., b/f the Democrat excesses kick in),
provided that you included all of the federal taxes, such as the payroll taxes, in your progressivity computations.
