A flat tax would exacerbate income inequality, which is socially destabilizing. Working class white males are dying at an alarming rate from suicides and alcohol poisoning.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078.full.pdf

When you have that happening, folks are prone to demagogues like Trump rising to power.

This is one of those "this tax by itself isn't much" games. Then you add them all up...

Income inequality is not the issue; income mobility is. And please don't show me one of those studies which show based on income percentiles the US is worse than Scandinavia. Those income percentiles are compressed so that doesn't mean as much.

We need policies that promote income mobility, overall mobility not mobility based upon percentiles. If we can have income mobility in all percentiles, then if the disparity increases, what the hell.

We need people to understand just voting to tax the up twenty or thirty percentiles is NOT the answer.

We need to limit the growth or stymie the growth of government altogether. Government in terms of growth is a luxury which we can't afford. We can't afford it. We have enough and don't need to grow it. We need to stop hiring government employees when they retire and limit bureaucracies which contribute nothing to the economy.

The estate tax is a punishment. You've worked and managed to save, and now that you save, you now punish somebody for succeeding. Typical liberal. Punish success during life through progressive taxation and punish the hell out of success upon death. Jealousy knows no limits.

I just can't understand the jealousy of the liberal mindset. You hate success. You want everybody to be miserable and Churchhill was wont to say. I want all to be successful, and we need proper incentives and rewards, not continual punishments. We don't need the disincentives for small businesses which a very important element of the economy and society. Yet Liberals and Dems hate, loath and want to destroy small businesses. I represent small business owners and don't understand the loathing liberals and statists have for this vital element.

Income mobility and income distribution are almost perfectly correlated.

I have read studies which say otherwise, but go ahead buy into the socialist mantra.

We do have problems with income and wages but that is in large part to the government's economic and fiscal policies of the past seven years. If we had not have the stimulus, we would have recovered more quickly and the income mobility would have increased. But socialists and neo-Keynesian philosophy will continue to drag us down.

This is easily proven. Go look at states with the.most income mobility and look at states that are most egalitarian. Utah is the most egalitarian state and the.most mobile. You don't need.a study, just numbers.

Ok how in the world would anybody be able to know that? The data in the pre-Keynesian era is of really crappy quality, so we really can't compare.

John B. Taylor from Stanford indicated previous data shows that recoveries are faster, unless stimulus is involved, which tends to crowd out investors and slow down recoveries.

There is NO multiplier effect despite fifty years of trying to prove it. We have to deal with business cycles and interfering makes it worse.

http://www.johnbtaylor.com/

That's a minority view but worth checking out after I get done with my work project.

I realize it is a minority view, but most macro-economists are by nature statists who have invested their whole lives believing government could smooth out the effects of the business cycle. And there is significant enough literature disputing the efficacy of the "multiplier" effect despite being a popular sacred cow.

Friedman of course disputed these assumptions, being a monetarist.

Friedman's views on monetary policy are now consensus too. Will get to this later.