Ping
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The Flat Tax proposals have one major failing.
No matter how you slice it, they remain a tax directly levied on a person's earned income and retains the IRS in all its audits, and administrative authority. It is not the form that matters, it in the intrusive charactor and capacity of the IRS to dig into household financial privacy to prove your returns are accurate and reports all income on them to calculate the taxable portion.
The first income tax was flat and became the monster we know today in its full glory.
The solution to ending the progressive income tax is to end it. To perpetuate the income tax on families it in any form just leaves us open for continued abuse., whether as taxes on business and wage earnings in its own right, or the additional taxes on our wages, the SS/Medicare payroll taxes. Both are perpetuated in current flat tax proposals and none adress the bottom line issue or eliminating the direct taxation of earned personal income and all that implies in administrative burden to the citizen.
"A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house....The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the tax payer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state."
-- Virginian House Speaker Richard E. Byrd, 1910, predicting the consequences of an income tax.
The alternative:
John Linder in the House(HR25) & Saxby Chambliss Senate(S25) offer a comprehensive bill to kill all income and SS/Medicare payroll taxes outright and replace them with with a national retail sales tax administered by the states.
H.R.25,S.25
A bill to promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national retail sales tax to be administered primarily by the States.Refer for additional information:
Glad to hear it. It's a good way to keep supporters up to date.