The missing chunk of money you are trying to find has been identified-- it is the payroll and income taxes. You should not expect to find 18% in addition to income and payroll taxes because they are probably about 15% of overall costs right there so all you need are 8% more and you are at the needed 23% savings that the FairTaxers have been estimating are embedded in the cost of goods.
The reason it is unlikely is that all of the money that the FairTax models plan to collect have been identified. The largest chunk by far is the income and payroll taxes. Now that we actually know that these were intended to be retained by the business in order to reduce prices, we know where the FairTax model expected the money to come from.
I am not one to believe that compliance costs will go down much for most companies since almost all the accounting needs to be done to run the business, and for public corps in order to meet SEC regulations.
There is hardly any corporate tax to be wrung out.
I also believe that people are spending millions of dollars on oil and gas investments simply because they have a tax liability: (http://www.petd.com/). These investments are nothing but tax avoidance. What could the 60 million of their last deal have done if it wasn't invested for tax reasons?
You have done us a service by finding out about the flaw in the FairTax book. What have you done to eradicate the tax code and fund the gov't fairly?
Rob, WTF are we doing here? This is a Republic. If we want the tax code changed, we change it; PERIOD!!! So what we are doing on Free Republic is what our congressmen SHOULD be doing, debating the merits. I'll tell you one thing about Boortz that is significant, he is right about us, we are perfectly happy to crucify all of the other congressmen that vote their own pork but are not willing to realize that we are VERY guilty of the very same thing. We keep electing our congresscritters because it is always THE OTHER congressman who screws up.