Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Tax Reform Poll

As the new Congress prepares for their next session, one of the items on their agenda, will be tax reform. We ask our readers:

"What kind of tax reform will serve all Americans best?"


This poll is intentionally designed to give a broad set of options, so we may see what people are really thinking, rather than limiting the options to only a few popular plans. In a few more weeks, we will post a poll that limits the options to only those options that ranked high on this poll. But for now, we just want to know what you would do, if you were in charge.

Vote now, by going to http://www.ActionAmerica.org/taxpoll.shtml

 

1 comment:

ActionAmerica said...

With just over 350 votes in, some interesting trends are developing in our Tax Reform Poll.

It is no surprise that the Fair Tax is leading, but it's interesting to note by how wide a margin the Fair Tax is leading. At this time, the Fair Tax is leading with more than 71% of the votes.

Even more interesting, is the poor showing of the Flat Tax, with just over 10% of the votes, so far and the fact that the Flat Tax is barely staying even with an option that does not exist as a bill in Congress or even as a formal proposal of any kind. In fact, this may turn out to be the most significant development in this poll. After all, this would appear to indicate that support for the Flat Tax is very weak among taxpayers. This is especially likely, since we did go to some length to imform several Flat Tax Blogs and mailing lists, along with some neutral tax reform blogs.

Consider that the Flat Tax has received tons of press coverage and is being promoted by none other than Steve Forbes. On the other hand, taxing the states and letting each state collect taxes within their borders, as they see fit - has not been discussed in the media at all, as far as I am aware and has no major name behind it. Yet, every time I have checked the poll results, taxing the states has been within less than 1% of the Flat Tax and actually led the Flat Tax for a few hours yesterday. It is only one vote behind the Flat Tax as I write this.

The initial purpose of this poll, having such a wide variety of options, was to confirm our expectations that the Fair Tax and the Flat Tax were really the only two options that we needed to include in a more limited poll that will follow this poll. As it appears, it is a good thing that we ran this poll first, as we were wrong in our expectations and there is another tax reform option that seems to have as much support as the Flat Tax. Unless things change in the next couple of days, our follow-up poll will ask people to decide between the top three options from this poll, the Fair Tax, the Flat Tax and taxing the states.

Whoda thunk it?...