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You make some very valid points regarding the Fair Tax. I wonder, though, if you are aware of the extent to which Americans under the current system are today either paying no taxes, or receiving net benefits from the government. In 2005, the bottom 50% of taxpayers paid only 3% of all income taxes. In addition, many of those same taxpayers (plus a large number of those in the next decile) wound up paying less than nothing; i.e., receiving a net benefit, due to programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which has been extended to very middle-class people (as was recently proposed with S-CHIP).

While people can and do move between income brackets from year to year, Congress has created a situation where half the taxpayers pay virtually all the taxes and benefits for everyone. How fair is that? But any politician who proposed that the "poor" (poor for America, anyway) pay THEIR fair share would be destroyed politically, no matter how morally and economically correct they happened to be.

And there is your real problem, my FRiend: our previously self-reliant, independence-minded culture has been corrupted over time by the same mentality of entitlement that is presently helping to destroy much of Europe. That, along with a few million baby-making Muslims who seem to think they need not work for the dhimmis they soon expect to rule. The difference is: we still have a chance.

I’m well aware. That’s why I say we need to reverse this trend of removing people from the tax roles.

I used to be a supporter of the FairTax, if you can call 5 years of donating money to FairTax.org and defending it here on FR “support”. I always qualified my support by saying I’d much prefer it without the prebate because it perpetuates the trend to growing number of non-taxpayer voters. It only recently occurred to me that it would actually worsen the situation as compared to the current system — because lower middle class people would be relieved of the SS/M tax as well. That is the straw that broke the camel’s back. People being eligible for SS/M benefits after never having paid a dime into it.

I still think the FairTax would be a positive development if we kept SS/M as-is and eliminated the prebate. Those two changes would give us a 12% FairTax rate that would be much more palatable to people and leave SS/M taxes and benefits to be dealt with as a separate issue.