Disclaimer: I wrote the following paper this evening with only a simply premise to get me started. I am not a tax professional. My complete knowledge of tax issues came from only a few sources. These would be a textbook on Microeconomics, my partial reading of the FairTax proposal, recent completion of a 1040-EZ form, and liberal surfing of the sometimes unreliable Wikipedia. Let’s begin.

Current US tax codes are very long and complex. According to various Republican representatives, the full text of the code is is somewhere between 2,500 and 2,500,000 pages long (http://www.trygve.com/taxcode.html). According to the US Government Printing Office, the adjusted gross page count is 16,845.

These figures are often used by politicians to paint the picture that our tax system is too complex and full of loopholes. Probably the most famous of alternative proposals is the so-called “FairTax” system which reduces the federal income tax, corporate income taxes, and capital gains taxes into a single sales tax. There are downsides not the least being it still allows for loopholes (because there is a ton of exemptions) and significant incentive for an underground economy. It only seems to be the best solution as 45 states already have a sales tax implemented and therefore there already is a large infrastructure for using this tax system. A a better solution would be to use other existing infrastructure that wouldn’t put such a burden on businesses which would be watched by the IRS much more closely under the FairTax.

Property taxes were once a major source of revenue at the state level, particularly prior to 1900, which was before states switched to relying upon income tax and sales tax as their main sources of revenue (http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/fisher.property.tax.history.us). But times were quite different back then as the federal government was still giving away unclaimed land to those willing to develop it plus there wasn’t enough goods and services being traded to provide adequate revenue for the government. Even if there was, there certainly was no infrastructure to properly track the required taxes. Today’s trading landscape is much different with billions of dollars worth of goods and services being traded daily and the record keeping required to stay compliant is massive. If you’re going to simplify the tax code, moving the entire burden and responsibility to American businesses doesn’t seem to be the answer.

The solutions I would search for are those that achieve three primary goals:

1. Simplify and reduce the tax code as to place less burden on those required to be compliant. Emphasis would be placed on using existing tax infrastructure instead of implementing new systems.
2. All taxes shouldn’t explicitly create winners and losers by targeting specific groups of people.
3. Reducing the number of exceptions, loopholes, tax evasion incentives, and overall level of bureaucracy.

Here’s the plan:

Property taxes (at the municipal, county, or state level) would be increased for landowners and owners of personal transportation property (registered automobiles, boats, and aircraft). The most valuable properties are owned by corporations not individuals, therefore, all corporate-owned properties would be subject to this addition in place of the current 15% to 35% Federal corporate tax.

The reason I’m targeting property owners is simple:

• It follows rule #1 of using existing tax infrastructure.
• Real estate is a finite resource and since people of higher incomes are disproportionately likely to own more valuable property, the tax is progressive. For the nearly 1/3 of Americans who don’t own real estate, they will pay the tax indirectly through the increased cost of renting/leasing passed on by the landowner.
• Personal transportation property has been added to help make up for the massive loss of sales tax revenue from new and used vehicle purchases. Instead of a fixed rate as implemented by the few states which tax personal property, we would use a variable rate based on a “blue book” value of the property.

As always SOME exemptions would have to be created for certain land types and landowners such as Indian reservations, non-profits/charities, unemployed and retired persons, and perhaps the Amish??? (I’m not sure how they handle property taxes right now).

The property tax increase would be implemented in two phases. The first phase would be to replace the income and sales tax at the state level with the property tax. Since most state already a property tax based on it’s value, it just has to be determined how much of an increase would be necessary to match the loses from the removal of state income and sales tax. The property tax on corporate-owned property (which would replace the corporate tax) would by collected by the state and transferred by them to the Federal government. During this stage a Federal income tax would still be levied as usual. It would probably take several years the new system to stabilize and then it would be on to the second phase.

In phase two, property taxes would again be increased simultaneously when the Federal income tax is removed. The money would still be collected locally by the state so at the citizen level you would never be paying money directly to the Federal government.

Taxes also serve an additional purpose besides raising money to pay for government services. They also provide economic incentive (or penalty) for things that would otherwise not make good financial sense. The can help to equalize the playing field between products/services that are more beneficial, but would not otherwise make good financial sense. They can also make it financially costly to do things that would hurt society as a whole (such as polluting).

As such, a few existing secondary taxes would also be kept aside from the primary tax on property. There’s a bunch of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax#Kinds_of_taxes, but I’d propose keeping current Excises and Tariffs as they are right now and dumping most everything else.

Obviously, this kind of major change isn’t likely to ever happen, but it was a fun thought exercise and I think I learned a bit more about taxation in America while researching it. So go ahead, rip it apart in the comments…

To start with, we’re going to compare Apple Final Cut Pro and Sony Vegas Pro. I know these products are only indirect competitors due to their different platforms, but these are the only programs I have extensively used. If you would like more specific advise, you’ll have to ask someone else.

Final Cut Pro (FCP) is very much an industry standard and is often used along side with high-end systems from Avid, Media100, or Leitch in production facilities. Many theatrical movies and television shows have been edited in FCP which Apple loves to tout at industry conventions. FCP is also a standard in many education institutes so most new editors entering the video industry are trained on it.

That being said, most timeline-based editors such as Vegas and FCP function in a very similar manner. Although the specific names of functions and keyboard shortcuts may change, the same concepts apply and are fairly easy to apply to different editing software. Most new editors (usually with a Premiere or FCP background) can be trained on Vegas very quickly.

Personally I use Vegas because I have a PC and therefore cannot use FCP on it. I considered Adobe Premiere as well several years ago before making the purchase, but chose Vegas for several reasons:

1. Vegas supports putting nearly any file on the timeline without additional conversions. Premiere requires many “non-standard” files (such as DivX) to be converted to a supported format before they can be edited.
2. Vegas supports 3D tracks allowing for fairly complex compositions right in the timeline without need for addition FX software.
3. Vegas supported real-time native HDV playback from the timeline (which Premiere didn’t at the time).
4. Vegas bundles DVD Architect which (at the time) was significantly less expensive than a Premiere/Encore bundle.

I know I’ve dived into a bit of a Premiere comparison above, but it is another major player. On the PC side, Premiere has some advantages over Vegas as well. Premiere’s built-in titler is far superior to Vegas, and DVD Authoring with Adobe Encore is well integrated with Photoshop making complex DVD Menus way easier to build then using Sony’s DVD Architect.

On the Mac side, FCP has a number of advantages over Vegas including a fantastic titler (LiveType), superior DVD Authoring (with DVD Studio Pro), and supports a variety of hardware that Vegas does not.

If you’re planning on editing for primarily your own purposes, I would suggest you go ahead and learn Vegas. It’s a very powerful piece of software and quite inexpensive compared to other players in the marketplace. If you’re planning on getting a Mac in the future anyways OR want software experience that is more marketable, buy FCP with it and get started with that instead.

I’ve made a lot of predictions in the past. I remember downloading my copy of XP RC2 back in 2001 and thinking “Gee, a stable operating system from Microsoft that supports all my hardware? How can they ever top that?” I told several people at the time that Microsoft would have a terrible time launching a Windows XP replacement because anything they changed would be hated.

Now years later, it’s hard to claim a personal victory about this prediction since it wasn’t saved at archive.org for all the world to verify. So from now on when I predict a future event I will post it here so we can check up in the future and see if I’m right. For now, I’m giving myself a 100% prophecy score. Here’s a political prediction to get things started:

This election season, we have seen Democrats try to downplay their support of the 2003 Iraq invasion. I predict that in 2012, Republican politicials will attempt to distance themselves from their vote in favor of Bush’s bailout plan. By that time, the majority of American’s will agree that it was not a solution, was mismanaged, and was a waste of taxpayer money (kinda like the Iraq war).