Promoting a national sales tax makes business an arm of the government.
What we need is to get the government totally out of the tax collection business.
The best tax would be a tax on the creation of money.
The Federal government would take only 10% of the money needed to run the economy for one year.
This would make the government business friendly, making government pass business friendly laws in order for the income of the government to rise.
This would in effect limit the growth of government to 10% of the economy.
It would also make the government invisible to most Americans...no more reporting to the government how much you made, or having business report how much it sold.
Making the government collect on the amount of money it creates also would get the Federal Reserve Monkey off our backs.
The Federal government would be the only entity that would be allowed to create money...no more Federal Reserve Debt notes.
This is the only real answer to our economic and trade problems.
Having the retailers collect the tax does not make them an "arm" of the government at all and the businesses would be paid to collect the tax under the FairTax. If they WERE an arm of the government they would not be paid for this service - that's the way it is done presently; business collects taxes and is not paid for doing so. In addition, the government places many unfunded mandates upon businesses at present in doing this uncompensated service.
Also, the government hardly needs to tax the creation of money when they can so easily create it untaxed and have the tax results drop into their laps via the income tax. The income tax method benefits their revenues when money is created and offers them the wonderful political plum of controlling much of the citizens' lifestyles via income tax laws.