[Dimples]

Think about what you said:

How much did you spend over the course of a year? Simple -- take your income from all sources and subtract your net savings, multiply that by the NRST (tax-inclusive) rate, and there's your total taxes paid.

OK, that sounds a lot like filling out a 1040, with schedules A, B, & C: ... take your income from all sources ...OK, you've got your last paystub, or your W2 (some form of which will likely still exist for SS/MC wage reporting.) Then you've got your investment income, you know the Schedule B stuff, then you've got your capital gains (Schedule C), then you've got your rental income, then you've got your gambling income, then you've got your "other" income. I've probably forgotten a few, but today, I get statements ... probably still will under the FairTax.

That "simple" statement of "take your income from all sources" is no less complex under the FairTax than it us under the Income Tax.

Next:

... subtract your net savings ...

Hmmmm ... net savings ... do I get a statement for that? Let's see take the starting balances of all my accounts and add them together, then take the ending balances of all my accounts and add them together, then subtract the ending total from the beginning total ... simple. OK. I never had to do THAT before. But you're right, it's not that hard. ... by the way, if I used some "savings" to purchase an equity or asset, and the asset has increased in value, does that increase my net savings? or should I ignore that? ... I'm sure the average investor will know what to do.

...multiply that by the NRST...

OK. THAT'S easy.

For effective taxation, subtract twelve times the monthly FCA "prebate" from the total taxes you paid out.

OK, that's easy too. The answer is $5,243.34. Is that good? Last year I got a refund.

The only way this gets anywhere even close to complicated is if a significant portion of your purchases are for used/previously-taxed goods, which would not be subject to the NRST -- the total amount spent here would need to be subtracted from the "income minus savings" total before calculating taxes.

Well, glad to know that LAST part wasn't complicated! OK, now we're into Schedule B (on steroids). Let's see. How much did I pay in State and Local taxes. How about my mortgage payments ... OH , wait, a portion of my interest on my mortgage payment was taxable, so subtract that, and this time my principal was FULLY deductible WOW. Then there were my charitable deductions. OK....

... Now comes the hard part. How much did I spend on non-taxable purchases ... let's see where did I put those receipts ...oh, yeah... I didn't GET many receipts for my not taxable purchases. I got the one for tuition, and the E-Bay stuff ... oh I can probably look at my paypal account and my credit card statements to help figure that out; but then there are the garage sales and swap meets ... oh never mind. Hey you know, I NEVER had to track THIS much detail before just to figure out how much tax I paid!

Other than that exception, however, this whole idea of having to add up each receipt is laughably pointless.

Of course. What was I thinking!

[pigdog]

Under either tax system, it is difficult to influence your rate/amount of taxation after the fact ... in fact, it's not possible for the already-spent time period.

With the income tax system, due to its complexity it becomes difficult to the point of impossible for ANYONE to predict a least-tax path for the upcoming tax period (year) and this is shown by the many instances of submitting a given set of parameters to different tax pros (including some in the IRS) and finding there is not only no agreement among many of them (actually almost none) but that the "paths" they independently devise vary widely in results of taxation.

With the FairTax, a taxpayer has the very great benefit in the immediate time period of knowing on each and every taxable purchase what "his government" costs him on his loaf of bread, bunch of bananas, or badass BMW - and that is far more immediately meaningful and useful to his decision-making process that finding out 6 months or more later that he paid x% in tax on that item (and cannot then decide to not buy it for that reason).

Trying to pose that one's calculating "all his taxes paid" under the income tax (or any other for that matter) is meaningful in any useful way is certainly not the case and most do not do that anyway since it is not possible even under the income tax due in part to the component of hidden taxes.