Posted on 01/12/2015 6:21:42 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said Monday that Republicans should take advantage of their control of Congress to abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
We need to pass fundamental tax reform making our tax code simpler, flatter, fairer, he said Monday at Heritage Actions 2015 conservative policy summit. And Ill tell you, the single most important tax reform, we should abolish the IRS.
The last two years have fundamentally changed the dynamics of this debate [on the tax code], he said. As we have seen the weaponization of the IRS, as we have seen the Obama administration using the IRS in a partisan manner to punish its political enemies.
In my view there is a powerful populist instinct to take the 110,000 employees at the IRS, to padlock the building, and to put all 110,000 of them down on our southern border.
Cruz quickly clarified that that remark was somewhat tongue in cheek, but joked that anyone who had traveled thousands of miles to cross the border and saw thousands of IRS agents in their way would definitely turn around and go home.
He acknowledged its not really possible to abolish the IRS or adopt a flat tax while Obama is in office, but said Republicans should take steps in that direction by doing whatever they can to simplify the tax code and make its burden lighter and reduce the power of Washington.
Republicans will get walloped in 2016 if they return to business as usual while controlling Congress, he said, and urged leadership to take on a bold agenda.
The election was not an embrace of a particular party but a rejection of the path the country is on, he said. It was the voters saying, the Obama economy, it aint working. We want something different. We want real leadership.
If we simply settle into business as usual in this town and keep growing and growing and growing the leviathan and keep shrinking and shrinking and shrinking that sphere of individual liberty, we will demoralize the men and women who came out in November, he added.
He outlined an agenda that includes repealing and replacing Obamacare, securing the border, passing the Keystone XL pipeline, auditing the Federal Reserve and taking a hard line against ISIS and Iran.
Lets lead with a big, bold, positive agenda that says to the American people you had a referendum and you rejected the Obama agenda there is a better way, he said. Thats our opportunity.
I have seen him take questions in what appeared to be an impromptu interview and field them with the right answers and no hesitation. Either the event was very well scripted and produced, or more likely, you are right. He is quick off the cuff and the answers were good.
It should be ZERO.
and many should be in prison.
HOORAY gaijin. HOORAY Cruz.
He is right. Then go after BLM, TSA, and Homeland Security. They are all instruments of tyranny.
Yes it is, and in so many ways. Truer words were never spoken.
It consistently amazes me how many so-called conservatives are willing to tolerate the Marxist Tyranny known as the "progressive" income tax, not to mention inheritance taxes and a fractional reserve banking system, all of which are central planks of the Communist Manifesto.
We don't need a "kinder, gentler" income tax: we need to renounce it as the collectivist abomination that it is, and abolish it altogether.
Just because we, our parents, and our grandparents had to submit to this horrible Statist construct doesn't mean we should resignedly allow it to be imposed on our posterity...
Second, the goal should be a tax that is SIMPLE and LOW. A 10%-15% flat tax fits that bill. Everybody pays the same % tax. Bye, bye 74,000-page tax code. Bye, bye giant, threatening IRS. Hello economic boom in America greater even than the 25-year economic boom following Reagan's tax cuts.
No, the FairTax is not the only way.
This is why so many people do not buy the line that the FairTax this and the FairTax that. The FairTax is only one means of tax collection. It does not address the longevity of the IRS, it does not limit spending, it does make the problems with entitlements “go away”.
1. 30,000M tax lobbyists--HALF the lobbyists in Washington, DC--fighting for every scrap of a tax loophole. And you get political corruption on a huge scale over this.
2. The result is a tax code over 75,000 pages long so complex that it makes James Joyce's famously unreadable Finnegans Wake almost easy to read in comparison. Even the IRS can't figure out much of the tax code!
3. The sheer complexity means exorbitant yearly compliance and economic opportunity costs, estimated by some economists to soon approach US$1 TRILLION per year (and climbing fast in each subsequent year, especially with the imposition of Obamacare mandates through the tax code).
4. It also encourages the outsourcing of millions of jobs, thousands of factories, and hundreds of corporate headquarters for tax avoidance reasons. Care to explain why Apple manufactures its products in China, and why Google has to used that highly-complex and expensive Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich accounting scheme to lower its tax bill?
5. It results in (by some estimates) around US$15 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets sitting in offshore financial centers and other foreign banks for tax avoidance reasons (care to explain all those "banks" in the Cayman Islands, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, and so on? Or why Apple has 70% of its US$147 billion liquid asset reserve outside the USA?).
6. Government uses the tax code as a political instrument to favor or punish political constituencies as little as ONE taxpaying entity. The recent scandal using the IRS to target conservative 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups is clear proof of this.
7. Because the IRS needs to know intimate details of personal and business financial records in tax return filings, there are potentially serious issues with invasion of privacy. Care to explain why former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's private tax returns ended up in the offices of Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)?
8. The IRS assumes you're guilty of tax evasion, and you end up having less rights than most common criminals!
Complete economic and political insanity. Now you know my tagline....
But this won't happen until it's done by a new constitutional convention, because the single greatest source of Congressional graft are bribes aka campaign contributions in exchange for tax breaks.
Yep. No prebate, no swarm of bureaucrats. Don't pay on the first 1.5 X poverty level, pay 10% on the rest.
No muss, no fuss.
Agreed. Nice synopsis.
A flat tax can’t exist when the 16th Amendment is repealed.
Additionally, Id like to see the language in Justice John Marshalls clarification of Congresss limited power to lay taxes amended to the Constitution.
Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States. Justice John Marshall, v. Ogden, 1824.
“Republicans will get walloped in 2016 if they return to business as usual”
“(GOP) business as usual”: Jeb Bush awards Hillary Clinton a medal, while Darrell Issa pretends to go after the IRS and Holder, et al., and so forth and so on, and John Boehner punishes conservatives.
Ted Cruz or bust in 2016!
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