The Simple, Fair & Flat Tax, -Part Two

     Here in Part Two I'm addressing the Fair Tax, Property Taxation and a couple ideas regarding tariffs.
  
    Fair to me means that everybody pays. The way to do that is through a National Sales Tax (NST) on everything that is bought & sold. Nothing is exempt, not food nor labor. This is not a Value Added Tax (VAT), where a product is taxed a multitude of times as it changes hands or is improved. No this is a tax that is collected at the Municipal level,(cities/township, etc.) on the end-product by the consumer. Yes, I know, we've got States Rights issues here and the states would have to alter their taxation schemes for this to work.

     This is a very simple overview: 
     Let's say that I purchase a Widget at the local retail store for $100. The NST is included in the price. The store owner pays the local City "Revenuer" the $10. The city keeps $2 and passes $8 on to the County, the County then keeps $2 and passes $6 on to the State, now the State keeps $2 and passes the last $4 to Washington. Washington pays for it's fiscal requirements and expects to receive requests from States, Counties and Municipalities to fund special needs from the general pool of money being held by the federal government.


     
     Here's a criticism: You've made everything 10% more expensive!
     No, (besides that this should replace whatever sales taxes are already being collected) due to the huge overhead reductions we've achieved by changing to the new corporate tax of 10% and removed the burden of  Social Security, Unemployment and all the other mandated expenses, prices will drop a whole lot more than 10%. Couple that with regulatory and tort reform, just think of the decrease in money spent by employers on Liability Insurance, Workers Compensation and compliance personnel.

     What about States Rights?
     If a State doesn't want to participate then they have no claim to petition for money from the NST fund held by the Federal government.

     Now, about Property Taxes:
     There should be no taxation of Personal Property nor Inventory. Real Estate, both residential and commercial, is another story. When there is a sale, it should be taxed (by counties/parish/shire/whatever) at 1% of the appraised value and continue to be taxed at 1% every year.

     Tariffs on imported goods:
     I'm not talking about something stupid like Smoot-Hawley. OK, Americans have a right to buy something that competes with domestically-made products to save money. Fine.

Idea #1 -Every product should have an index of the man-hours that must go into selling a single unit to the American end-buyer. That includes acquiring raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, assembly, packaging, marketing and whatever else it takes to get it to the checkout stand. If we decided that if 50% of those man-hours were performed by American workers then no duty is assessed on the imported good. If less than 5% of the paid man-hours were performed by Americans then that product gets the full tariff that brings the price of the product to within 95% of the American-made competing product.

Idea #2 -  Either separate from or incorporated into Idea #1, what if we charged a 10% Import Fee on everything that is imported and that money is used to payoff the money borrowed from foreign governments until the debt is extinguished. Our creditors would be interested in helping us get rid of the debt ASAP to make their exports more competitive in our market.