[quote=ArlJim78]I fully agree that the smugglers are ones to target and eliminate. I'm also with you on the crackdown on employers who hire people through the back door. All of these things done in the dark are subject to abuse.
And many things favor the poor, are you kidding?
Just look at the tax code!No fairness there if you ask me.[/QUOTE]
Not quite accurate if you're saying the poor get a better deal- the NYTimes ran an editorial in early March mentioning how many, many wealthy people pay less than 10 percent of their income in taxes. And when you factor in sales tax, which affects all income levels the same, the poor are paying a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the wealthy.
But I agree; no fairness in the tax code.
Here's the pertinent part of the NYTimes editorial. I'll also post the link, though I think you need to be a premium subscriber to read it. The editorial itself was about the ATM, and an interesting history lesson on it.
<<Regardless, until another course is chosen, a law focused on rich investors who paid little or no tax is now a law that affects 23.4 million of the nation's 90 million taxpayers.
The story began on Jan. 17, 1969, three days before the Johnson administration was to end. Joseph W. Barr, who served only a few weeks as Treasury secretary, told a Congressional panel about the 155 families who paid no income tax, despite incomes of $1 million or more in today's dollars.
Mr. Barr's report made the front page of newspapers across the country the next morning and fueled debates in coffee shops, police stations and across kitchen tables. Congress in 1969 received more letters about these untaxed Americans than it did about Vietnam, according to Michael Graetz, a Yale Law School professor and tax adviser in the George H. W. Bush administration.
While the idea of paying your fair share as a moral issue may seem strange today, it was central to tax debates in that era. The disclosure that some of those who had gained the most by living in the United States did not share in the costs of the war infuriated many taxpayers....
Meanwhile the stated goal of the original tax is not being met under the successor tax enacted 21 years ago. A far greater number of well-off families still pay only small amounts of tax. More than 41,000 taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 or more in 2003, the last year for which figures are available, paid less than 10 percent of their income in individual income taxes. And the number of untaxed high-income families -- once 155 -- grew to 2,824.>>
http://select.nytimes.com/search/res...AA0894DF404482