And anything you bring back would have to be declared and taxed. There’s only so much you can hide.

If 2 people spend $50,000, why should their tax rate be different? Why should it depend on what they buy, on how much something costs, how much money they earn, or how much money they have?

Money is a tool, money is a resource, money is useless unless it’s spent. You can’t wear it, you can’t eat it, you can’t drive it, and you can’t live in it.

If you are worried about lower income families, learn about the prebate the FAIR tax includes for people below the poverty line. It replaces the Earned Income Credit and welfare.

And how do you think those rich people get their money? It’s not from income, like you and I, but from dividends and capital gains, which are already taxed much less. I’m sure there are a number of rich people that pay their tax without too many shenanigans.

Besides, you know darn well that Congress would never ever pass a FAIR Tax as it’s currently written. Those crooks need to line their pockets and will create categories of products so as to try to stick it to the rich. But the rich don’t need to buy luxury items. Remember what happened to the yacht market with the 10% luxury tax? Congress destroyed it because the wealthy stopped buying and put thousands of people out of work.

The rest stands. Under Fair Tax, if you don’t spend, you don’t pay tax. That’s fundamental to it. Rich people don’t spend; they save. Therefore they don’t pay tax. For the proposal to be “revenue neutral”, some other tax source must offset the amount that rich people no longer pay.

You want to impose a tax burden shift downwards… knowing that 1. the economy is still in the crapper, and 2. “revenue neutral” isn’t even sufficient to pay your bills in the face of the government deficit. You want to raise taxes on the majority of citizens: the middle class, of which you are probably in. And you think this is a good idea?

I hope you read this. Do your self a favor and read the book educate your self on the proposed bill before making idiotic remarks. Don’t just throw numbers around in attempt to sound intelligent (didn’t work) and to start the number is 23%. Find out the rest for your self.

If you make $30k a year (before taxes), you probably spend close to all of your income. If you make $300k a year, you’ll probably save a VERY significant proportion of it. If you make $3m a year, you probably didn’t spend much more than if you made $300k a year, and if you made $300m a year, you’re probably spending more money avoiding taxes than everything else you spend on. Including the house, second house, third house, cottage, car, car, car, car, yacht, etc.

How do you make a sales tax “revenue neutral” at 30% when a person making $300m might spend $2.5m a year, while a person making $3m might spend $2m a year? That’s $89 million lost revenue right there, at 30% income tax vs sales tax.

ME. What this quote describes is, in effect, what others have called a “demogrant.” Prebate = demogrant.

“Currently, there is negative taxation in the way of all the welfare freebies, like Section 8 housing, WIC, Medicaid, food stamps, SSI, Earned Income Credits, etc.”

ME. It is to the credit of the Fair tax that it would tax consumption no matter where the money to pay for it comes from.

The Flat Tax would abolish the EIC and WIC for sure, and tax SSI, Social Security, and any welfare benefits in money. Benefits in kind, such as food stamps and Medicaid, would escape tax.

Demogrants + section 8 + Medicaid + food stamps + living in a small town = tolerable poverty.

“We currently have 5th generation welfare babies.”

ME. 40 years ago, the country I live in substantially increased the weekly payment to single mothers. The consequences have been what one would expect.

I have redone their calculations several times. Their claim that a 19% flat rate would be revenue neutral is too optimistic. A rate of 21-22% would be required.

The Flat Tax would definitely reduce the tax owed by nearly everyone earning more than 300-500K, and would raise the tax paid by some families of modest means. In other words, it can’t fly. The solution is to expand it so as to replace the regressive FICA payroll tax. That would require adding 8% to the flat rate. In effect, this spreads the cost of the Social Security over all income, not just wages under 100K/year/person.

The Hall-Rabushka personal allowances are too complicated. Replace them with a demogrant whose annual amount is equivalent to $7-10/day. That done, there would be no need to tax wages separately from capital income. All income payments to households would be free of tax.

Hall-Rabushka did not think enough about nonprofits. Nonprofits would have to file tax returns like all other employers and payers of interest. The only advantage nonprofits would rightly enjoy is that they would not include donations in their taxable revenue.

The Flat Tax would enjoy some of the self-enforcement properties of the value added tax.

The main advantage of the Flat Tax, especially modified along the lines I propose, is that compliance and administration costs would be far far lower than they are at present. The IRS would interact only with firms and other employers. There would be only a handful of tax forms, with none being more than 1 page long. The only persons who would interact with the IRS would be the self-employed. The vast majority of us would go through our lives without ever seeing a tax form.

What country do you live in? Currently, there is negative taxation in the way of all the welfare freebies, like Section 8 housing, WIC, Medicaid, food stamps, SSI, Earned Income Credits, etc. We currently have 5th generation welfare babies.

The Fair Tax is a flat tax on spending, defined as everything except the purchase of financial assets. (How the Fair Tax would treat owner-occupied housing is a crucial and nontrivial detail.) The Fair Tax is equivalent to a flat tax on income (a la Hall-Rabushka) that would treat all financial assets as if they were held in tax-deferred arrangements. How to adjust Roth IRAs for the transition to the Fair Tax is another crucial and nontrivial detail.

The great advantage of the Fair and Flat Taxes are that income neither has to be defined, nor does it have to be traced to its ultimate recipient. The Flat Tax taxes value added once, at the business source. The Fair Tax taxes value added also once, but at the retail end. The savings in administrative cost would be enormous, on the order of several tens of billions of dollars per year.

The Flat and Fair taxes would also mean that business investment and equipment and structures would be fully deductible in the year incurred. They would also do away with all taxation of capital gains.

I associate the Fair Tax with an article in the Atlantic a few years back, by Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economist, and Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian who is quite warm to economic thinking. I have not read that article, but have seen it cited. I am very well acquainted with Hall and Rabushka’s flat tax. H&R claimed that a flat tax of 19% would replace the Federal income taxes on personal and corporate incomes. They are mistaken; a rate of 22% would be required. The Fair Tax is equivalent to a flat tax of 23%, and would replace the FICA payroll tax as well Federal income taxes. That rate is too low; to replace the FICA tax as well as Federal income taxes would require a flat rate of 30%.

In my work on the Hall-Rabushka flat tax, I concluded years ago that the simplest way to mitigate its harshness for people of modest means, and to assure that the average tax rate is progressive when the marginal tax rate is not, is a quarterly lump sum paid to every legal resident in the country, preferably via a direct deposit to a bank account. I call this lump sum the “demogrant.” A demogrant on the order of $3000-$3500/year would leave most Americans of modest means somewhat better off than they are at present. Keep in mind that the Fair tax in effect taxes all government handouts of any kind. Because it is awarded unconditionally, the demogrant would introduce a negative income tax to the USA.

The Fair tax would mean that about $1 trillion of the GDP of the USA would be taken from all by taxation, and redistributed to all equally. The negative wealth effect on the incentive to hold a job could be nontrivial. A family of 6 would receive a total demogrant of about $20K per annum. That, plus public housing and Medicaid, would lead some adults to do nothing productive with their lives, especially adults accustomed to a third world standard of living. The main reason we do not have a negative income tax in the USA is that large scale and expensive controlled experiments in the 1970s and 80s revealed that when families are assured of a modest income, many wives throw their husbands out and seek to raise their children alone. Congress could not stomach being seen as encouraging divorce. Thus died the negative income tax.

Bruce Barnes mentions the Federal Excise Taxes. While I don’t much like the excise tax on telephone billings and vehicle tires, I have no difficulty with the excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol. Also, the excise tax on gasoline is an effective user charge for road use. Gasoline should be taxed at a level high enough to pay for all highway construction and repair, and much of the cost of the city and state police.

A consumption tax is not regressive at all. If two people spend $30,000, shouldn’t they both be taxed equally?

There are only two variables here. The difference in how they spend their money and how much income each person has.

1) What people spend their money on is personal choice. Some people rent a home, some people buy a home. Some people like to eat out, some people like to vacation, others like to buy antiques. Some people like Yugos, others like Cadillacs. In short, some people like experiences, others like things. Some spend more, some spend less. Who are we to tell them how to spend their money by screwing with the tax code? Granted, stuff happens and we are forced to spend money, but that’s why people save money, right?
2) Money in the bank or under the mattress provides no benefit. It’s all potential. If I die, I can’t take it with me. My heirs will get it, but if they don’t spend it, it does them no good either. People who spend more money pay more tax. People who spend less pay less tax.

And for those people the don’t read, the “prebate” as I believe it’s called, makes the tax progressive. The less money you spend, the less tax you pay as a total percentage of money spent.

“Because American consumers are highly price-sensitive, and our current income tax system is relatively invisible when it comes to making day-to-day purchases. But if you start adding to the cost of an item at the checkout counter, people will think twice before buying a random geegaw or doodad.”

First, you’re ignoring that customers don’t *have* the money to begin with in the current system. A substantial portion of your paycheck is withheld to pay federal taxes, and while it may be “invisible”, you simply don’t have the money. Any sticker-shock would be offset by the equal shock at having 15-25% more in your bank account, plus the poverty rebate.

Second, prices are set, in most markets, by supply and demand, and it’s more likely to cut into corporate *profits* rather than drive up the cost, since they’ll have to continue selling. However, that will be offset by the reduction in taxation, since our corporate income tax, one of the highest corporate income taxes in the industrialized world, would be replaced by taxes collected at the cash register rather than upstream from the consumer.

Indeed, national sales taxes are quite common around the world, including in Canada and the European Union, and while their total tax burdens may be obstacles to growth (one Swedish study suggests the EU, if it were an American state, would be the fifth poorest after Arkansas), their use of a consumption tax to collect it does not appear to be.

While I may not have to pay a social security tax what happens to the approximately 8% of my social security payments that now come from my employer and is part of my pay package as an imbedded cost? Does anyone believe they will be getting an 8% raise from this?

A 30% tax on my food bill, a 30% tax on my water bill? They can’t my air yet.

Hetty Green would love this if she were alive today.

http://linderfairtax.house.gov.....=FAQs.Home

Competition will drive prices down.

FairTax will give the economy an immediate stimulus without the disasterous effect of Marxist socialism and government micro-management.

Government dabbling into the housing market has been a disaster already, and we are headed for something much more worse under an attempted socialist government control that has bogged down economies everywhere it has been tried.

Many commenters have latched onto my admission that I hadn’t read Boortz’s book, and have then gone on to immediately misconstrue my concerns and thump their chest about how great the Fair Tax would be for our country. Just so we’re clear, I’m not overly concerned about the long term effect on prices (go back and read what I wrote). But what about in the near term? Do you *really* believe that prices would instantaneously reflect these changes? Our tax system is hugely complex, so I don’t think it will be that simple. But perhaps I’m mistaken.

Are these short term concerns a valid reason to maintain the status quo? Perhaps not. But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about them.

Between my rent and medical expenses alone, I will be completely soaked under the Fair Tax. Bare minimum, I’m looking at a $3000+ hike in my annual taxes. That would pretty much bring me to a subsistence-level existence (no ability to add to my savings account or retirement fund). I don’t believe for one second that my landlord, any of the landlords around me, my health insurer, or any of the hospitals or doctors they contract with are going to lower their prices/charges. I seriously doubt many other business will, either. They’ll simply pocket the extra profit. Why? Because they can. That’s how the economy works in the country and I’ve seen nothing about the Fair Tax that would address that reality.

Besides that one little problem, I think it’s a great idea. Too bad I can’t afford it.

A lot of you are misled as to how it works.

I have never seen price reduction due to competition or reductions in taxes or fees happen with my utilities, telephone, cable, cell phone, internet. I have not seen the cost of my food go down since the price of transport decreased. Besides gasoline, I have not seen any price hike go away in the last 4 months – and we’re on a deflationary roller coaster ride even as I type. Why would they be any more likely to reduce prices if their costs are lower than they are now?

I just don’t see how your idealistic notions of business practices translates into verifiable reality. And that’s my biggest concern about the Fair Tax. So much of it’s “neutral” effect on middle income earners depends on idealistic beliefs about free-market capitalism.

Under the FairTax you would pay $10.54 and your receipt would say:
Item: $7.70
FairTax: $2.30
Sales tax @ 7%: $0.54 (assuming the FT isn’t taxed)

This is how “prices will go down” under the FT, if the elimination of payroll tax doesn’t change anything. So if anything, eliminating that expense will allow businesses to lower prices in order to compete, if they so choose. If they choose not to, they will lose business to competitors who did lower their price.
Simple as that.

I’ve been burned plenty badly by the Gotcha Capitalism of the last 15 years or so. I don’t have the same faith as the rest of you that businesses will reduce the prices of their products and services once the “embedded taxes” are removed. I’ve seen government-imposed taxes and fees removed on services like utilities, cell phones, DSL/cable etc., and in every single case I have experienced exactly zero effect on my bills because those companies just added some ridiculous charge that just so happened to equal the removed tax/fee. While the cost of fuel has gone way down, I sure haven’t seen any corresponding price reductions in the food I buy.

Clearly the supporters of the Fair Tax have more faith that companies will do what’s right than I do. Maybe there’s some sort of mathematical evidence that supports ethical business behavior that I know nothing about?

Other than all those messy human nature issues, I’ve got no inherent problem with the Fair Tax. I just don’t see how anyone could guarantee prices of goods and services will go down unless we were all robots whose programs could be updated.

But what I like about it is that it gives me the ultimate choice in where my tax dollars go. If I personally don’t support a particular foreign war, I could just buy used goods (untaxable, under the FairTax) until that war ends. If I DO support a particular administrative move, I can go out of my way to Buy New American.

Such flexibility is the stuff of legend. It’s also how the country USED to run, back when people were concerned about their freedom.

Several important things you forgot to mention:
-payroll taxes will also be gone which helps businesses as well as the employee to earn higher wages.
-with no fwt, employees take home $$ will be more…therefore more cash to spend.
-businesses will not have to pay income tax either (which will drive down “actual” cost of products because the embedded taxes in all goods will be gone)
-this will encourage businesses to stay in the US instead of sending jobs to other countries with less tax burdens
-and most important to me: people won’t be able to cheat on taxes. Drug dealers, illegal immigrants, strippers (and others that live off tips and don’t claim all of their income) will all pay taxes anytime they purchase a new product.

All that being said, don’t take my opinion or anyone elses. Read the book, do the research yourself, and then make your own decision.

Oh well, I’ll keep searching. It’s getting old, though.

It takes into account increased take home pay and all of that. Great. According to this calculator, I would pay $520 less under the Fair Tax than the current system.

However, this calculator does not take into account the $10,320 I pay annually for rent nor does it consider the $4300 I pay (based on 2008 expenses) for out-of-pocket medical care. I’m not even thinking about food or necessary utilities (like heat/electricity and water) here. But if we were to consider it, we can throw in about $1500 a year for food and about $2000 a year for non-optional utilities. (only water and electricity)

So, do you think all of the tax on all of the above come to equal to or less than my $520 savings from the calculator? This is what I am struggling with.

The thing is, these are predictions. You can’t be 100% sure that rents are going to go down enough such that people like me aren’t going to pay more in taxes. You’re asking me to take a pretty large gamble. I want to support the Fair Tax – I really do. I’ve even read the book. The reality is that every single “Fair Tax Calculator” I have encountered has me paying $2000-$4000 more per year than what I’m currently paying. The increased taxes are because of rent and my out-of-pocket costs for medical care.

As far as I can determine, the Fair Tax is great if you use very little health care or your insurance has no or very low out-of-pocket costs and if you’re a homeowner. That’s great for people who own their own home and don’t have any history of cancer, congenital illness, etc. And please don’t tell me I can choose to go without health care or that I can always find a cardboard box to live in. I’ve had Fair Tax supporters say that to me, and it really doesn’t help your cause any.

Yeah, if I made $5,000-20,000 a year more than I currently do, I’d probably be 100% behind this idea. But I don’t, I won’t be seeing a pay increase any time soon, and it’s hard to support something that’s going to really, really hurt financially.

(single & annual of $30,000 gross)

The income tax is already factored in by businesses when they price their products. Abolishing the income tax will decrease built-in costs by about 30%, and competition will ensure the prices actually drop.

Basically, prices stay the same…you just stop worrying about your federal taxes. Plus, we start to tax the nontaxable (illegal drugs, etc), no one escapes the system, the IRS is dethroned and on and on.

It’s brilliant, really.

Over the last few months I have seen several opinion pieces regarding the Fair Tax. In separate articles, both Amity Schlaes and Rich Lowry were opposed to the Fair Tax, but (it seemed to me) on the basis of wrong information. To give you one example, Lowry stated that the tax would be applied to the purchase of homes. Only partly true. Only on NEW homes would a tax be charged. Re-sale homes would not be affected. In fact the tax would not be applied on anything used: cars, boats, clothes, furniture, as well as re-sale homes.

But if you did buy a new home you would pay about the same–including the national sales tax–as you would now. Here’s why:

The Fair Tax eliminates federal payroll taxes, which are Income, Social Security, and Medicare. So the employee would take home a much larger paycheck. It replaces that revenue with a national sales tax, to be charged at time of purchase of goods or services. It also eliminates the income tax on businesses. These business income taxes are passed along to the consumer and make up about 22% to 27% of the price of goods we now buy. So if businesses no longer have to pay those taxes, competition will cause those prices to drop by about the same amount. If you are adding 23% sales tax to that lower product price, you end up paying about the same, but with much more money to spend because you had no federal payroll deductions on your paycheck.

Mr. Lowry also mentioned that the proposed 23% national sales tax is actually closer to 30%. He’s right, if you figure it that way: If you spend $100, $23 of that would be the Fair Tax and would go to the government. Taking $77 ($100 – $23) and then adding the $23, it would come out to be 30% of $77. But Mr. Lowry misses the main point. If you calculated the imbedded corporate taxes the same way, the 22% to 27% becomes 28% to 37%. The point is that the Fair Tax would replace the imbedded taxes that we already pay on all goods, and we actually would end up paying less on many items, even while including the Fair Tax.

Most people have a hard time believing that enough revenue would come in to replace the payroll deductions. But some of the best economists have done the math, and have found otherwise. Here are some reasons for their conclusions: Right now, you have 158 million workers paying income tax through payroll deductions. With Fair Tax, you would have 300 million Americans contributing through their purchases. Also, 50 million tourists a year would be supporting the US government through all of their purchases. There is a large amount of income in the US that is not taxed. You have the very wealthy, who can afford to do business offshore or overseas, so pay very little in taxes, but live here, and buy here. You have many who illegally avoid paying taxes on their income. And you have illegal businesses, like drugs, which pay no taxes. The government estimates that 3 trillion dollars a year of income is currently not taxed. But whoever makes that money probably buys cars, jewelry, yachts, etc. With Fair Tax, they will pay their fair share.

You might be wondering whether low income earners who pay little or no income tax will be harder hit under this plan. Actually, only after a certain level of income (approximately the poverty level) does the Fair Tax kick in. So, depending on the size of your family, you would get a monthly rebate to cover the taxes paid on purchases up to that level. Nobody pays the national sales tax until they spend more than the poverty level for their family. And that would apply to everyone. Those in the lower income brackets would do very well: even though they don’t pay Federal Income now, they would also have Social Security and Medicare deductions eliminated from their paychecks, prices on goods would be much lower, and they would pay no Fair Tax on used clothing, cars, furniture, jewelry, homes, or anything used. So, they could avoid paying taxes almost entirely, but still be receiving that monthly rebate check. Their earnings would go much farther than under the current system.

As soon as we switch over to the new system, the revenue from payroll taxes would be completely replaced by the national sales tax. But what happens after that is the truly amazing part of the story.

Because businesses are no longer paying income taxes themselves, they will have a huge advantage competing with foreign companies. Not only will they be super competitive overseas, but they will be able to capture more of the market here in the US which has been overrun by products from foreign companies. The estimates are that 10% growth of our entire economy will occur in the first year! And when the economy is growing, what happens to the working guy? More opportunity and better pay! If employees are getting paid more, guess what? They spend more and more revenue flows to the government.

On top of that, foreign companies will be racing to relocate in the US to gain the tax-free advantage. More jobs for Americans, more chance to move into better paying jobs, more money, and more revenue for the government. Within a few years our economy could absolutely explode, and money would pour into the government. At that point, we literally could be looking at eliminating the Social Security and Medicare crisis, and paying off the national debt. Remember, right now Social Security and Medicare are supported only by those who are working, who will be increasingly outnumbered by those collecting the benefits. But under the Fair Tax, those programs are supported by nearly everyone who is a consumer. And if the economy is doing great, the investments of many of those retired baby boomers will dramatically increase, so they will have more to spend which will, again, increase government revenue.

It sounds fantastic, I know. It’s difficult to convey the reality and possibility of such a dramatic change in a few short paragraphs. But the Fair Tax has been researched and developed for over 20 years, and is now supported by over 70 US congressmen. Rich Lowry is an editor at National Review magazine which was started by the late, great William F. Buckley, Jr. I don’t know if Mr. Buckley had any opinion on the Fair Tax, but I imagine it would have appealed to him: a plan of profound common sense, which would require courage to implement, and would be a blow to a tax monster that increasingly subjugates and impoverishes us. I challenge you journalists to get one of the short Fair Tax books to learn what it is really about, and form an opinion based on facts. You can order from their website, http://www.fairtax.org.

“Well Jim, that FairTax would be a great idea if I came up with it, but I’m afraid that the whole “prebate” idea and “no mortgage interest deductions” are not going to poll well with my constituents because I said so.”

You have it exactly right, my friend.

The point you make in post 138 is one of those truths thats seems so obvious to us supporters that we neglect to point it out, but –

Under the FairTax, if you don’t want to pay taxes, you don’t have to!

Let’s say you don’t support a particular policy. You can call up your Congressman and say, “Hey buddy, I don’t agree with this policy, and until it goes away, I won’t be buying any NEW items.”

Then the manufacturers of those items lose money, which gives them less to contribute to your Congressman’s next campaign, then he/she loses an election down the road.

See how much power that gives you?

That’s what the country used to be like until the IRS was created – during the Civil War, to INCREASE tax revenue by mandating it!

Hi. I think it may be time for you to re-address the (as of this writing) second-most talked about blog post you’ve ever written.

I have been reading your blog fairly regularly since that post brought me here, and I do agree with much of what you say. But there is a point where we differ.

I’m talking about the FairTax post. I noticed that you responded to comments exactly once – on the day the blog entry was written – and I would encourage you to take a gander at what has been written in response since then.

I was a bit hard on you in my first few posts, but you must understand. Your initial reaction to the FairTax is the equivalent of you calling me a big fat liar just because your buddy told you I was.

But if you got to know me, you’d see I wasn’t so bad. So it is with the Fair Tax. If you would just READ the thing, or even just the Plain English Summary (http://www.fairtax.org/PDF/Pla.....ct2007.pdf) you’d see it’s actually a pretty good deal.

Evan as a supporter though, I have to insist that they abandon all the “23% inclusive” rhetoric. Normal people just don’t know what that means. Hell, I have a journalism degree and I had to have it explained to me.
It is a 30% sales tax, plain and simple, but this distracts people from the even simpler fact that THE TOTAL PRICE YOU PAY FOR ITEMS WILL NOT CHANGE.

If something is 9.99 + 7% sales tax now, it costs 10.69 total.
Under the FairTax, this item STILL cost you 10.69, but the receipt will say something more like $7.12 + 30% sales tax = 10.69.

This, I think, is the single biggest fact that FairTax supporters are glossing over. But our opponents are certainly exploiting it to their advantage – even John McCain’s current position on the FairTax is based on this misinformation.

And it’s supposedly a conservative issue, despite the fact that it would completely untax the poor.

In fact it completely untaxes everyone on the basic essentials of life, and taxes us only on (excuse the language) shit we don’t need.

People call this regressive because the more money you make, you can afford a more disproportional amount of “shit you don’t need.”

But this is just whining, plain and simple. Under the FairTax, if you are poor, you are already NOT BEING TAXED! What more could you ask from your government? To complain about having a disproportionate amount of stuff that you would be taxed while buying is equivalent to saying “I envy rich people because they pay more taxes than me.”

This is all I have to say for now. I will also be posting this in the comments of the original blog post, so that further discussion may be stimulated.

Thanks,
Randy
===================

And I think John did a pretty good job of explaining the relationship between a 23% INclusive tax and a 30% EXclusive tax.

1. The percentage that you use 30% is correct because you calculated it exclusively. The FairTax is advertised as being 23%. This is because the FairTax is calculated inclusively. We can use the example that is mentioned in this posting: an item costs $1.30. The 30 cents is tax and therefore 30/100= a 30% tax. Now we can calculate this inclusively: 30/1.30=23% tax rate, which is exactly how the FairTax is quoted. Simply a difference of tax rate calculation. Now think about your payroll taxes. They are calculated inclusively, just like the FairTax. If income taxes were calculated exclusively, then we’d all be paying much higher tax rates!!! A family makes $100,000 a year and is taxed at a 25% rate. Their take home pay is then $75,000 is the tax is calculated inclusively. Calculated exclusively 25,000/75,000= 33% tax rate. There’s your difference in tax rates.

2. Where this blog post is also wrong is that prices would go up. Think about the taxes that a corporation pays to the government. The corporate tax is currently 35%. Therefore 35 cents out of every dollar you spend at Walmart goes to the government already. The FairTax eliminates the corporate taxes, and simplifies the process for corporations for filing their taxes. And think of how much simpler payroll will also be for corporations! Billions of dollars saved right there! Prices go down dramatically before the FairTax is added. Prices will definitely not go up anywhere close to 30%. Prices will probably go up but only 1-2%.

Taxes are an extremely complicated issue. This is why the push for tax reform has been so weak. The truth is, our current system is outdated, complicated, and needs to be dramatically reformed. The FairTax is the only comprehensive plan that can dramatically simplify the US tax system while producing a reliable source of income for our government. Just please research about the taxes you pay, how much time you spend per year preparing your taxes, and get the real facts about the FairTax. I highly recommend reading the books and going to FairTax.com. And did anyone mention that the 23% FairTax rate would be able to pay for the collapsing social security and medicare system? Think about it and research it. We need a grass roots support for this.

However, from what I read on fairtax.org I can stand side by side with Republicans and support this.

I did notice that a good portion of the detractors are the people with something to lose such as the people who aren’t paying taxes (either legally or illegally) or enjoying huge refunds or work in the tax field. Not to be mean but what’s fair to you is not fair to me. I didn’t force you to make your decisions and I don’t want to pay for them. I’m not saying to end all entitlement programs but I want to help the people who need help and not the people who play the system. Actually I have an idea that would fix that too, simply make anyone who wasn’t disabled help the community or get an education. The country would be better off and the people would be better off too.

And can you really claim to understand 65000 pages of tax code and pay the correct amount? I can’t even read the code without getting a migraine.

Maybe there will be a period of adjustment for the economy but there will always be people who spend every dollar and some who save and invest as much as they can so shouldn’t we reward good behavior?

I do not expect that a Windfall Tax would cause an oil company’s profits to decrease. I would expect them to increase the price of gasoline to cover that additional tax burden – thus passing the taxation directly to the consumer – and in fact, as an investor I would demand it.

And then we will all pay even higher prices at the pump regardless. So the Windfall Tax is not just a bad idea, it’s an exercise in futility.

Somebody should. That windfall profits tax scheme is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. Worse even than the proposed Gas Tax Holiday, which is saying quite a bit.

This will be the first election I can recall where I am actually HOPING that the candidates can’t keep their campaign promises.