[Eaglewatcher]

More fodder for the fire!

[Willie Green]

Writing science fiction for about a penny a word is no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion.

~ L. Ron Hubbard

...the movement for consumption-based taxation has been hijacked by a group of extremists whose principal interest is abolishing the Internal Revenue Service.²¹ They believe that if virtually all federal taxes are abolished and replaced with a retail sales tax like those in the states, then the states can simply collect the federal government's revenue for it, thereby allowing for abolition of the IRS...

²¹ The Church of Scientology originated this legislation as part of a campaign against the IRS because it refused for many years to allow gifts to the church to be deducted as legitimate charitable contributions, on the grounds that it was not a true church. The IRS eventually relented. See Davis (1997) and Starobin (1995) for discussions of the Church of Scientology's role in the sales tax campaign.

Davis, Bob. 1997. "CATS Out of the Bag." World, 12:9 (May 31/June 7).
Starobin, Paul. 1995. "No Returns." National Journal (March 18): 666-671.

source

[KarlInOhio]

The elimination of all of these taxes would allow workers to take home all of their paychecks. No withholding and no income taxes.

Remember the 22-cents-out-of-every-dollar embedded taxes described in Part I of this paper? Take all of those taxes out, and institute a 23-cents-of-every-dollar consumption tax, and the prices of goods and services haven't changed much.

You can't get both your whole current gross pay and have post-FairTax prices remain at their current levels. Most of the 22% embedded tax Dr. Jorgensen calculated was the income tax and employee's half of Social Security. To remove the 22% embedded tax, your employer would have to retain the amount he pays you to cover your income tax. If he pays you your gross pay, the remaining embedded tax of the employer's half of SS and business profits tax is only about 9%.

[adamsjas]

We have to pay others called CPAs (Certified Public Accountants) to do it for us. Think about this: we have to pay people money in order to pay the government money. How ridiculous! With the FairTax, businesses would just collect the consumption tax at the time of purchase, much like they already do in states where there is a sales tax.

Further, these businesses get paid a small percentage to collect these taxes, and forward them to their local (city, state, etc) tax authority. That tax authority gets paid a small percentage to collect and forward them to the Feds.

So businesses don't even deal with the feds, just their local sales tax authority.

Money flows from the states to the feds not the other way around.

[Zon]

ping

[lewislynn]

Taxes, and more specifically, personal income taxes and self-employment taxes. Because small businesses are small, the owners typically pay taxes on the personal level or as small corporations.

And with the Fairtax, small business owners would have to raise their prices the amount of the tax. If small business owners selling retail or performing a service (a huge part of our economy) didn't raise their prices they would take a double tax hit, Once directly to the government on their sales/service and again when they spend what money they have left.

[kpp_kpp]

can someone explain the "cost of hidden taxes" on this page:

http://www.fairtax.org/tax_returns_single.html
Cost of hidden taxes due to the income tax system: -3,101

$819 of it is the matching payroll taxes, what are the other $2282 in 'hidden' taxes?

[FreedomCalls]

"Imagine if all of these trillions of dollars were added back to the American economy."

and later:

"The FairTax is neither a tax cut nor a tax hike, but an alternative method of gathering revenue for the Federal Government"

That's a contradiction right there. If it's "revenue neutral" then trillions of dollars will NOT be added back to the American economy. It will go where it goes before the fair tax.

[Gaffer]

Fair tax is dead because there is a likely majority of citizens (even some who've died, are in jail, and perhaps illegal) are living off the rest of us. The situation will not fail because we (conservatives) do not have enough of a majority to overwhelmingly force this on them.

All that is happening now is that Neal Boortz is getting richer off the book and John Linder is gaining support and donations from whence he might not have before.

I agree the tax system needs to be overhauled but it will not happen in my lifetime.....