www.fairtax.org

February 12, 2010

As the nation drowns in a sea of red ink, more and more and more citizens of all political affiliations are asking “what went wrong with the American dream?”

From coast to American coast and driven by necessity, the American people are awakening to the need to wrest control of our destiny from those who advance their political fortunes at the cost of the genius of the American spirit of innovation, hard work, independence and liberty. There is a dawning realization among a rapidly growing number of citizens that the solution waits in FairTax legislation, HR25, which does more to shift power from government to the citizen than any other single change since the founding of the nation.

More and more experts warn of extended unemployment for what experts also define as the most productive workforce in the world. Once the envy of the world, Bethlehem steel no longer dominates the world, cotton miles across the south no longer ship to the once powerful textile industries in South Carolina, and workers in Detroit see the American automobile industry struggling to regain momentum and take the lead back from foreign manufacturers. From the San Joaquin valley of California to the wheat and corn fields of the Midwest, we grow enough food to feed the world but worry that we don’t have enough food to feed our own children.

In the nation that saw clipper ships ranging the world faster than any competitor, that developed the surgery to replace the human heart, , that brought the personal computer forth from a hometown garage in California, that won world wars and went on to rebuild Europe and Asia and that put man after a ten year effort on the moon, we now actually wonder whether the American people can trump the narrow self-interests of a few in Washington who profit lucratively by trading tax code favors against the best interests of nation and every taxpayer.

Our system of government, we are reminded, was never meant to be handed over to a “political class”. It does not fly right on “automatic pilot”. The Founding Fathers understood the inherent nature of government to gather more and more power unto itself and equipped our citizens with the means to restore the proper role of the people over jealously guarded power concentrated within small circles of influence and profit. It could not be more needed.

The FairTax shifts federal taxes away from what helps the economy—work, saving and investment—to what comes out of the economy—consumption. As significantly, the FairTax shift the power of federal taxation from the backrooms of Congress to the American citizen who then chooses, by personal consumption choices, the timing and size of each family’s tax burden. It exposes the cost of the federal government and makes each consumer a “stakeholder” in the spending habits of government and it frees the American economy to soar to heights not yet seen.

But this needed change waits for the will of the American people. It waits for the great awakening of self-determination that seems to have begun now in TEA parties, in living rooms and at the polls. There are now more Independent voters than either Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians. The FairTax unites all for a new era of American growth, the immediate healing of our economy and millions of needed jobs. It makes the American worker once more in demand and the genius of American productivity and invention again the envy of the world. It waits for the American people to find their voice and their clout to return our great nation to one that is “of, by and for” hometown America. It waits for us.

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www.humanevents.com

by Michael Reagan
01/30/2010

We are speeding toward an economic cliff because our government can’t practice restraint.

We spend so much more than we take in because politicians at every level use the public treasury to win elections. The public mostly accepts lavish promises of more and more federal spending because the cost of government has been so effectively divorced from what actually comes out of our paychecks.

Ask almost anyone how they did on their taxes and you’re likely to hear a happy exclamation that the taxpayer got a little money back! But ask the same person how much they paid the government over the year in withheld income and payroll taxes and you’ll often see a blank look.

When the money that government spends seems so unconnected to the money we earn it is easy for many to see government expenditures as “free money.” It’s not, but the engineered divorce in perception between the fruits of our labors and spending by elected officials has resulted in a national debt that equals more than $500,000 per American household. If not for accounting sleights-of-hand the national debt would be seen as much higher than even the shocking figure of more than $12 trillion.

As my father, Ronald Reagan, once said, “Our federal tax system is, in short, utterly impossible, utterly unjust and completely counterproductive, it reeks with injustice and is fundamentally un-American… it has earned a rebellion and it’s time we rebelled.”

I agree and that’s why I am enthusiastically now helping FairTax.org with pending legislation to replace the income tax entirely with a fair, progressive and honest national consumption tax aptly called the FairTax. It ends all federal taxes on income and earnings and replaces every penny now raised with a 23% tax on personal consumption at the point of final retail sale.

In conducting research on the FairTax, I have become convinced of two things: the FairTax is the best way to create a new era of healthy American economic growth, and that my father would have been a strong proponent of the FairTax as a tax reform/replacement model had it existed during his time in government.

Among many virtues, like the effect the FairTax will have on bringing trillions of private, job-producing investment dollars into our economy, the FairTax restores critically needed transparency to government spending. Because the taxpayer sees the cost of government on every receipt, the relationship between personal earnings and government spending becomes crystal clear. This will inevitably lead to public pressure to restrain spending — and not a moment too soon.

Workers take home paychecks free of federal withholding and FICA taxes under the FairTax. This is a stimulus idea that we all need. Congressional corruption of the tax code disappears under the FairTax because there are no exemptions that can be expanded and sold for profit and power by tax writing committees to the favored few. In essence, those who spend more pay higher taxes.

Instead of exemptions that can manipulated by Congress, the FairTax issues a monthly “prebate” check that covers the taxes we will pay on the necessities of life and which wipes out all federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level. In addition, hidden income-tax costs now embedded in the price of products we pay will also be eliminated and brought into the bright light of public scrutiny.

When you consider that fat cats, illegal immigrants and the underground economy all become part of the tax base, as consumers, it is easy to see that we can all pay less of a share for government. It’s just a better, more honest and simple way to collect federal taxes, and one that makes April 15 just another spring day.

It’s time for the second American tax revolt and that’s why I am helping lead the FairTax national movement and encouraging everyone to join the cause by visiting www.fairtax.org.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on 130 radio stations nationally as part of American Family Radio. Look for Mike’s newest book “Twice Adopted” (Broadman & Holman Publishers) and “The City on a Hill,” other info at www.Reagan.com.

http://www.ourcaucus.com/Article7.html

I have not been on their website for a few months and was very excited to find the webpage above. They don’t mention the FairTax by name, and there are a few differences, but ours is the closest bill by far to what they are advocating.

This page is one of the better summaries of the benefits of an NST that I have seen.

Phil Hinson

PS: If you have not checked out the entire website, I highly recommend it. They are working hard to put the spotlight on the corrupt system of trading campaign cash for earmarks and tax preferences which is so prevalent in Washington these days.

vimeo.com

An Inconvenient Tax – Official Trailer from Life Is My Movie Entertainment on Vimeo.

An Inconvenient Tax sheds light on one of America’s messiest problems — a fundamentally broken tax code that affects every part of people’s lives. With the U.S. Congress making over 16,000 changes to the tax code in the last two decades alone, many Americans want something better, but few know where to start. This feature-length documentary film reveals the many ways Congress uses the tax code to achieve political goals that have nothing to do with raising revenue. It also tackles the controversial issue of tax reform through a non-partisan presentation of U.S. tax history and current proposals to fix the code. In a time when America faces fiscal crisis, An Inconvenient Tax brings a crucial exploration of the tax code to the big screen.

The bill can either be voted out of committee as an open or a closed bill. Congressman Linder has indicated that he will elect to have it sent forward as a closed bill, which means that no amendments may be offered on the floor of the house – only a straight up or down vote. Amendments may be offered in the Ways & Means Committee, but Congressman Linder will still have control and can elect to halt the process if the amendments defeat the purpose of the bill.

Phil Hinson

http://fff.org/

by Gregory Bresiger, Posted July 16, 2008

Part 2

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

— Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Sen. William Roth, a fiscal conservative who was one of the authors of the Kemp-Roth tax-cut bill of the early 1980s, correctly linked the IRS’s imperious, lawless actions to Congress’s spending addictions. More than occasional IRS scandals demonstrated how dangerous this agency was. But lawmakers generally had little interest in what was going on. The IRS, which Roth’s 1990s congressional investigation found set quotas for bringing in money, was essential.

Roth warned that Congress has traditionally been interested only in how much money the IRS could raise, not the means used. Indeed, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that Congress hadn’t done a good job policing the IRS:

“What seemed to matter most was that the taxes were getting collected. We have never paid attention either to the organization or to the job we were giving it,” said Moynihan, as quoted in Roth’s 1999 book, The Power to Destroy. Nevertheless, neither Congress nor presidents can pass the responsibility to someone else.

David Keating, of the National Taxpayers Union, quoted in the same book, zeroed in on the problem:

Congress wrote the tax laws, created the IRS, and funds the agency. So who’s ultimately responsible for how it works?

Meanwhile, the taxpayer ends up with a heads-he-loses- and-tails-he-loses situation.

On the one hand, most Congresses have grossly overspent, seeing political power as originating in new programs and the extensions of old ones. Therefore, they need a rapacious IRS to keep the leviathan funded and expanding. When the IRS broke laws and wrecked lives, citizens turned for help to Congress, which usually provided none.

Bureaucratic ruthlessness

But what about those members of Congress who were sick of overspending or actually wanted the government to spend and tax less? They were, and are, hesitant to investigate and keep a close watch on the IRS. How many lives and how many businesses does the IRS ruin each year? The implicit threat today by the IRS against members of Congress is: Investigate us and we’ll ruin you.

This is more than a threat. Members of Congress who have actually wanted to conduct full-scale investigations of the IRS and its predecessor agencies have been at the receiving end of IRS retaliation.

In the mid 1920s, Michigan Sen. James Couzens announced he wanted to investigate charges of graft that were swirling around the Bureau of Internal Revenue, one of the predecessors of the IRS. Couzens believed there was “widespread corruption and secret deal-making” in the bureau, according to David Burnham’s book A Law unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS.

A year into his investigation, the Bureau of Internal Revenue suddenly discovered that Couzens owed the government $11 million. Later, after a long and costly fight through the courts, it was discovered that the government actually owed Couzens a $1 million refund! The government action had been “a direct act of retaliation” for his investigation, according to Roth.

Other members of Congress who also wanted to investigate in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s found themselves the target of investigations. Or sometimes they were suddenly the subject of unflattering stories that were leaked by government officials.

In 1972, soon after Sen. Joseph Montoya of New Mexico announced he was looking into complaints against the IRS, a story was leaked to the Washington Post that he had tax problems. After an opponent used illegally disclosed information, Montoya lost reelection.

The power to destroy

The lesson then and now is clear: Anyone, no matter how good his record of paying taxes, can be snared by the power of the taxing authorities.

Supreme Court Justice John Marshall famously said that the “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” But the IRS, like a special prosecutor run amuck, can go one better. Its power to investigate, to raise questions that can be answered only by high-priced counsel or CPAs, certainly is “the power to destroy.” That’s regardless of whether one wins or losses in court.

Indeed, anyone looking at someone’s form 1040, Schedule A, “may learn whether the taxpayer or his family are under medical or psychiatric care. It may also reveal the filer’s religious affiliation, the objects and degree of his eleemosynary inclinations, the sources of his borrowed money,” according to a 1976 report to Congress.

So the IRS, with its immense data on every taxpayer, its seedy history, and special prosecutor-like power to investigate endlessly, can find something on almost anyone. And there are plenty of ways to get someone. The tax code is already thousands of confusing pages.

Even the IRS often gives out the wrong information over the phone. The code itself is a mess of conflicting rules and cloudy interpretations that can trip up people with decades of tax-preparation experience.

Money Magazine has assembled the best tax-preparation experts, lawyers, and CPAs, and enrolled agents with decades of experience. It has given everyone the same raw information for a tax return. What happens? The people with the most knowledge of the tax code come up with radically different answers. No one is safe, not even a former Treasury secretary.

The case of Andrew Mellon

Andrew Mellon was one of the most controversial Treasury secretaries in history. He was a highly popular official in the 1920s. His support of deep, across-the-board tax cuts combined with fiscal conservatism pulled the nation out of the 1920 depression. It led to a boom until the crash of 1929.

Many associate Mellon with the Great Depression, although his call for more tax-and-spending cuts after the crash was ignored by Herbert Hoover, who sacked him.

(The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., should be known as the Mellon Gallery. It was Mellon’s contributions to create the National Gallery, which were made in the last years of his life when he was fighting two bogus tax trials, that created the gallery that Americans enjoy today.)

Franklin Roosevelt targeted Mellon. As president, he had an attorney general and a tax agency that would accommodate his obsession with penalizing the rich. Even before being elected president, Governor Roosevelt, in 1926, called Mellon “the mastermind among the malefactors of great wealth.”

Roosevelt and others would later unjustly charge that Mellon had caused the Great Depression. Once elected president, Roosevelt had administrative and legal agencies at his beck and call. He decided to go after financiers such as Mellon.

The government’s civil and criminal cases against Mellon were argued over the course of two trials, the second of which wouldn’t end until after Mellon’s death. Mellon had the resources and the courage to fight them to the end of his life.

Yet, as David Cannadine, a hostile Mellon biographer (Mellon, an American Life), wrote, “Throughout his tenure at the Treasury, Mellon had dutifully observed both the rules and conventions for filing tax returns.” Cannadine writes.

His misfortune was that after 1932, the Roosevelt administration was determined to change those rules and conventions and, if possible, to apply those revisions, retroactively, making particular examples of particular rich men.

This is a devastating judgment that should make every taxpayer worry.

Roosevelt, after Mellon was exonerated in the second trial, was asked about the outcome at a press conference. The president disingenuously said he was waiting for a memo from the attorney general and never addressed the issue again. Mellon went to his grave not knowing that he had also won the second trial.

The disgraceful Mellon cases wouldn’t be the first time that the IRS and its predecessor agencies would be used by presidents to carry out political dirty tricks.

But it is not always the IRS itself that abuses its power of information. Sometimes it is presidents who use the IRS’s vast information to wreck a real or perceived political opponent.

For example, Congressman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat, found himself in the early 1970s on President Nixon’s famous enemies list. “When I got to Washington I was audited six times by the IRS,” Rangel writes in his recent memoir, And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since.

Tyranny and the income tax

But let us go back beyond the 20th century, back to the founding of the United States, to find the dangers of the powers delegated by Congress to the Treasury Department and its tax-collecting power.

Patrick Henry, at the debate over the adoption of the Constitution, predicted much of what would come to pass. He warned that the national government’s tax gatherers would “ruin you with impunity.” On another occasion, he said, “These harpies [the tax collectors] may search at any time your houses and your most secret recesses.”

Anyone and everyone can be ruined by the tax system and the often lawless, unaccountable government agency charged with enforcing a tax code that confounds. Indeed, I might sleep better if this article had no byline.

It is safer that I quote the dead, such as Patrick Henry, Senator Roth, and Commissioner Andrews. However, that could be dangerous too. The IRS has been known to go after the relatives and ex-spouses of people who supposedly didn’t pay their taxes.

Ultimately, there is only one answer to the dangers posed by the IRS: End the income tax system, which supports the evils of snooping government, a government in which the individual is held accountable before law, but never administrative agencies such as the IRS or the devious lawmakers who enable them.

The IRS is a key player in our leviathan. Its officials, like George III’s tax collectors, are the shock troops of the American Empire, every bit as bad as the British Empire or any other empire ravenous for revenue.

“A government is as strong as its income,” wrote Frank Chodorov in The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil. “Contrawise,” he wrote,

the independence of the people is in direct proportion to the amount of their wealth they can enjoy. We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government’s power to tax.

And we cannot restore liberty unless we end the government’s backdoor methods of making a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.

Part 1 | Part 2

Gregory Bresiger is a business writer living in Kew Gardens, New York.http://fff.org/

http://fff.org/
by Gregory Bresiger, Posted July 14, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2

He [King George III] has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.
— The Declaration of Independence

You may think you’re safe from the taxing authorities, but you’re not safe. Whether you’re one of the high and mighty or just a person of modest means, you’re not safe.

No one is safe from the prying eyes of the Internal Revenue Service. Not the politically powerful. Not small business people who run afoul of the IRS. Certainly not the members of Congress, who oversee the IRS and yet are also intimidated by it. Not even former cabinet secretaries are safe.

That’s because the IRS is a critical arm of Leviathan. As such, it is often above the law. It burns many of its records, an action that, if the average taxpayer were to carry it out, could result in his incarceration.

The IRS guards its history, shrouding it in secrecy. Its one historian, Shelley Davis, was fired. She wrote a book entitled Unbridled Power, warning of the IRS’s power. The IRS “remains one of the most understudied of all government agencies,” wrote John A. Andrew III in The Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon.

Above the law

There are many reasons that lawmakers, presidents, and others have looked the other way while the IRS destroyed people such as Joe Louis and Abbott and Costello. Louis, who raised countless dollars for the war effort during World War II, was hounded to death by the government. Abbott and Costello, who also raised money for the government during the war, basically saw their careers ended by the IRS’s relentless demands for money.

One reason the lawmakers have not stopped these injustices is that the IRS is a partisan weapon that can be used by shameless politicians. It can be used to destroy a political opponent.

“Presidents have used the IRS to settle old scores with rivals,” Andrew writes. He also says that presidents have used the IRS by using “questionable or illegal means.” For example, John Kennedy used the IRS to investigate right-wing groups that criticized him. Richard Nixon used the IRS to harass real or perceived political enemies.

Another reason to give free reign to the IRS is bipartisan: The IRS is charged with finding money and more money to fund the endless spending schemes of the welfare/warfare state. Almost everyone agrees that the government spends too much and therefore constantly needs more money. So Congress has implicitly or tacitly conceded unequaled power to the IRS.

“A revenue officer legally doing his or her job of collecting taxes cannot be stopped by anyone in this country, including the U.S. Supreme Court,” writes Robert Schriebman, a tax attorney with many years of practice and who has written myriad books on tax law. Schriebman says that it is also very difficult to stop “a lawless” revenue officer.

There are many others who will confirm this view. It was also the opinion of a number of ex-government officials, including Sen. William V. Roth Jr. and former IRS Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews. Even IRS officials have been frightened. Margaret Richardson, who once headed the IRS, said she feared what was going to happen when she received a letter from her employer.

“I had to stop and shake a minute before I opened the envelope,” she conceded. It was her paycheck. Why does the IRS, and the arcane income-tax system it enforces, inspire such dread?

Andrews and others have warned that Congress, in passing the income tax, took a signal step. Prior to its enactment, money was raised primarily through excises, tariffs, and other indirect taxes. The government was smaller. It needed much less money. There were effective spending limitations. Therefore, an income-tax system was not needed.

With the monetary curb of a gold-backed dollar, the government was limited in how much money it could spend. Here, as the Founders intended, was a natural brake on runaway government. And without an income tax, the government was limited in its ability to pry into the personal and business affairs of the average citizen.

“Inquisitorial scrutiny”

With the triumph of the income tax — which was passed in 1913 to ensure that the rich paid their “fair share,” but within a few decades was reaching into the pockets of people of middle incomes — the government had a new weapon for butting into everyone’s life. The income tax enabled the U.S. government to create prying administrative agencies, agencies with little or no accountability.

Yet the dangers of the income tax and the administrative system needed to carry it out had been apparent to several British statesmen in the 19th century. Sir Robert Peel imposed what he hoped would be a temporary income tax in 1842. Yet Prime Minister Peel, in a masterpiece of understatement, conceded, “A certain degree of inquisitorial scrutiny is, therefore, inseparable from an income tax.”

William Gladstone was a follower of Peel. In the later part of the 19th century, he was several times chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister. He also warned of the dangers of an income tax.

“The public feeling of its inequality is a fact most important in itself,” he said. “The inquisition it entails is a most serious disadvantage, and the frauds to which it leads are an evil such as it is not possible to characterize in terms too strong.”

Four times prime minister, Gladstone was one of the most popular leaders in British history. Nevertheless, “the People’s Billy” lost his battle to abolish the income tax. Those who wanted bigger government viewed this direct tax as a boon.

It is no different today. Even calls just to lower the income tax are usually followed by cries in the mainstream media that the government will collapse if it gets less money. (The irony, of course, is that lower income-tax rates often produce greater revenues, as proven by multiple administrations and as detailed in Jude Wanniski’s book The Way the World Works.) People opposed to lower income taxes or ending the system are usually people who favor big government.

By the way, Gladstone blamed his income-tax defeat on excessive public spending and the abandonment of “the spirit of thrift,” writes Charles Adams in For Good and Evil. It is significant that Gladstone resigned from his last ministry in 1894 when he clashed with his cabinet on defense spending. He thought it was reaching insane levels. The income tax is linked to huge increases in military spending.

Of empire and publicans

The same income-tax battle was fought and lost in the early 20th century on the other side of the Atlantic. America, at the turn of the 20th century and in the wake of the repulsive, superfluous Spanish-American War, was coming of age as a great power. It was turning away from traditions of nonintervention in Europe’s wars and a disdain for militarism. Now, in the wake of the war, America became a “great power.”

Great powers need armies and big navies. Great powers also need money and tax-collecting agencies. It is relevant that Theodore Roosevelt, a man who loved big navies and celebrated wars, called for an income tax in his annual message to Congress in 1908.

But the income tax and the army of publicans needed to enforce it do more than generate new sources of money for the government. This new taxation system endangers basic liberties. It gives the IRS the power to pry into how and where citizens receive and spend money. Congressman Robert Adams, back in the 1890s, had this brilliant insight:

The imposition of the [income] tax will corrupt the people. It will bring in its train the spy and the informer. It will necessitate a swarm of officials with inquisitorial powers.

America, two decades later, would adopt the income tax. And it would become a “great power,” but there was a price to pay — the existence of an army of tax agents who must find the money to pay for the evil wars that still plague us more than a century later.

Give me your bootstraps

Americans would have to shell out more. That’s because empires are expensive. But empires also require that citizens lose many of the liberties they had enjoyed under a decentralized republican government, which needed few taxes and few tax collectors.

Indeed, former IRS Commissioner Andrews argued that the income tax and the creation of the IRS weakened individual civil liberties. It effectively repealed or at least weakened the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights, according to Andrews.

Congress empowered “the tax collector to do the very things from which that article says we were to be secure. It opened up our homes, our papers, and our effects to the prying eyes of government agents and set the stage for searches of our books and vaults and for inquiries into our private affairs wherever the tax men might decide, even though there might not be any justification beyond mere cynical suspicion.”

Andrews, writing about a half century ago, warned that the income tax and IRS might also some day destroy our system of private property.

“As matters now stand,” he wrote in the 1950s, “if our children make the most of their capabilities and training, they will have to give most of it to the tax collector and so become slaves of the government. People cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps anymore because the tax collector gets the boots and straps as well.”

But surely Congress wouldn’t allow this to go on. Yes, it would, as we will see in part two.

rightwingnews.com
June 02, 2009

Strangely the most common complaint I hear about the FairTax is that it is a fantasy. I am told there are too many powerful interests for keeping the status quo. Well, that may change in the next few months, and very quickly I might add.

Two reasons for this are that some Democrats are actually pushing ideas that will remove any ability to distort the FairTax in the future. One example is the consideration of imposing a Value Added Tax, and the other is Barack Obama’s limiting of charitable deductions. Here is why this will make a major difference:

Many people who have never heard of the FairTax confuse it with a typical sales tax, which it is not, or a VAT, which it isn’t either. The value added tax is a hidden tax at all stages of production. The VAT simply makes all goods more expensive without anyone knowing why when they purchase goods.

Conversely, the FairTax, after removing all federal taxes, replaces them with a single transparent and open 23% tax (for those of you who have heard the argument that it is really 30%, no it is 23%). The FairTax prebate at the beginning of each month also ensures that the poor are not going to be taxed on the basic necessities of life.

Now, however, some Democrats are proposing the VAT, which will make this the perfect time for the FairTax and the VAT to be publicly debated. The more talk about the VAT, the more clarification there will be that the FairTax is different and better. When some politician in the future supports the FairTax, he or she will no longer have to distinguish between the two taxes.

The second famous attack against the FairTax is that charities will suffer without a charitable deduction. The fact of the matter is that the greatest correlation that leads to charitable giving is take home income. If you have more money to spend, you will also give more. Since people get to keep 100% of their paychecks under the FairTax, charities will not suffer.

Well, now that Barack Obama has decided to limit charitable deductions. People proposing the FairTax in the future will simply be able to point to Obama’s current tax plan as a means to judge what will happen. This isn’t to say that I don’t support charitable deductions; I do. But, if not having the deductions means we can get rid of the current tax system in favor of the FairTax, I am in full support.

So, with these two issues coming to the forefront, and the fact that the cosponsors of H.R. 25 are increasing, the FairTax might actually happen.

I don’t know how to compare the economic impact of a 10% VAT with adding the same amount to the income tax. What I do know is that increasing the total tax burden by that amount would be highly detrimental to the overall health of the economy, regardless of whether it is in the form of a VAT or an income tax. That is in direct contrast to the FairTax, which is revenue neutral (when measured statically) but would tremendously affect the efficiency of the economy and reduce the drag of the tax system.

Phil Hinson