My point was that the "all or nothing" approach from sales tax advocates hurts tax reform efforts. If both sides got together, I believe they could work together and enact a postcard type system like Armey proposed. Primarily because the elimination of witholding could be postponed.
Again, tweak away. But no matter how much mascera you paint on the income tax monster, it will still be a monster.
And a political note: Such tweaks will leave the electorate cold. In fact, the cynical gamesmanship will end up ticking off more voters than it ever attracts.
Any income-gbased tax system - whether flat or round - is bogged down with the same sort of baggage as the present system and will quickly become almost identical to it.
Don't you realize the K-Street crowd are just chomping at the bit that a Flat Tax is adopted to give them even more leeway (meaning higher fees) in "introducing" changes into any income-based tax system. That's what they do.
With the FairTax that sort of political mischief is done away with.
I believe they could work together and enact a postcard type system like Armey proposed. Primarily because the elimination of witholding could be postponed.
My bottomline, elimination of the income tax, the primary reason I'm interested in tax reform at all.
Flat Tax keeps an income tax and does nothing to eliminate the SS/Medicare wage tax which is just another income tax albeit with a cap.
Both are an anethama to any concept of personal privacy or liberty. They've got to go and a Flat Tax is just a route to hanging on to them for another century. No thanks.
Control of one's income and first option on what is done with it is fundamental to the exercise of property right and empowerment of the citizen.
Tax reform is not an issue of economics, it is an issue of personal Freedom, and empowerment.
| I discussed the importance of abolishing the income tax because of its tendency to form a habit of servility in the souls of a people that accepts it. Servility of soul is bad not only in itself, it is also an open door through which will soon walk the abuses of ambitious government power. Leaders who find themselves with governmental power over a servile people will be quick to conclude that such a people exist to serve them. |
"My point was that the "all or nothing" approach from sales tax advocates hurts tax reform efforts. If both sides got together, I believe they could work together and enact a postcard type system like Armey proposed. Primarily because the elimination of witholding could be postponed."
The Armey plan is now the Burgess plan and is apparently favored by Steve Forbes. It adds a flat tax option onto the current system.
IOW, not a word of the current 60,000 page monstrosity is eliminated and additional verbiage is presumably added to define the flat tax option. Therefore, from a standpoint of simplification, it fails abysmally.
In addition, it isn't revenue neutral, so it does not meet the President's criteria and has no chance of being enacted.
Furthermore, it does not address any of the major economic challenges that this country faces which are tax system related, such as the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare or our ballooning trade deficit.
Other than that, the Burgess plan is great.