Fair tax, Flat tax, This tax, That tax. Any system of taxation will require an agency to print forms and instructions, collect the money, and enforce the law. Any talk of eliminating the IRS is juvenile and ill informed.
“Fair tax, Flat tax, This tax, That tax. Any system of taxation will require an agency to print forms and instructions, collect the money, and enforce the law. Any talk of eliminating the IRS is juvenile and ill informed.”
I respectfully but strongly disagree. The current system measures over 70,000 pages as measured by CCH. That was the total at the end of 2009; they don’t have the 2010 tally up yet.
http://www.cch.com/wbot2009/WBOT_TaxLawPileUp2009_%2827%29_f.pdf
We want to replace it with a system which is currently less than 150 pages. If you accept the number of pages as a reasonable approximation of the complexity of the two systems, that is about a 99.8% simplification. Even if Treasury augments the bill itself with 1,000 pages of amplifying instructions, that is still an enormous decrease in waste and efficiency.
Under a sales tax regimen, huge areas of complexity, such as different depreciation methods, useful lives of assets, depreciation recapture, investment tax credit, earned income credit, etc, etc, etc become obsolete.
However, it gets even better. There are approximately 120 million filers under the current system. Under the FairTax, there would be about 20 million. Of those filers, a very small number of “big box” retailers, car dealers, etc. would comprise a very high percentage of total retail sales. That means that points of sale/enforcement would be dramatically reduced.
There are absolutely enormous efficiencies to be had here. I would suggest that anyone who does not comprehend that has not studied the subject to any significant extent.