How can taxing consumption boom the economy, when the economy is driven by the expectation of being able to purchase a thing when needed? With a NRST, much equipment nornally used by people will move out of their purchase range.
Of course, those making $30-60,000 a year will do just fine, but the tens of millions of wage earners and older people on fixed incomes won't be able handle the increased prices. Add up the fed and FICA taken from your check. Will it cover your purchases in the same time period when everyting you buy is 30% higher?
2. IRS threats and coercion eliminated and replaced with, if you don't want to pay the tax, don't buy the item.
Right. If you don't want food, heating fuel, shelter, clothing, ammunition/firearms, transportation, internet service, washers and dryers, et endless cetera, well, shoot, just don't buy them.
And for the tens of millions of Americans that find the tax too much, why, they can fill out forms every month under penalty of perjury to get some of it back. Now, just what would you think the nature of the organization that enforces law around that process would be?
3. 20% decrease in retail prices facilitates spending and partially offsets the retail tax.
How do you figure a 20% decrease in retail prices? The "hidden" padding companies charge to offset the cost of dealing with income taxes? What makes you think they will remove that from their base prices? If an NRST is implimented, people will expect a 30% increase of the prices they're currently paying. Surely you have noticed informal collusion in many industries to keep a price at a certain level. Maybe a law that they have to lower prices? Hee.
4. People will know how much leviathan government is really costing them, resulting in...
They already know. Look at the draconian measures that the people have let "get past" them over the decades and tell me that even if it were in their faces every day, not just every pay day, it would make them more politically active. Plus too many people want big, costly government. It's a socialism thing, and there's no limit to how big the govenrment can grow when it can tax consumption.
5. Shrinking government to it's constitutional function to protect synonymous private-property rights and individual rights from domestic and foreign criminals while upholding the sanctity of private contracts.
How do you get property rights protection from a NRST? It would be entirely the opposite, I would think. You think. The only thing that keeps the income tax level in check is the backlash from people for raising it, the backlash being they will, and do, stop reporting and paying it.
In the middle '80s, "our voluntary tax assessment" was being threatened by IRS arrogant abuses, according to the senate panel that ordered the IRS to back off. The threat, of course, was all the anti-income tax organization that sprang up, and the sheer number of people leaving that system and becoming costly to prosecute because of IRS manpower and the cost of prosecution.
What power do the people have under a NRST when they can stop buying the what they need to live in order to put pressure on the fed? Ballot box, political activism? I see no indication of that from past public behavior.
6. Freedom in United States leads to other countries doing similar or risk its citizens fleeing to United States to increase productivity here while enjoying the fruits/prosperity of their labor.
Why should anybody care about any other country's tax structure, unless under a global socialism? People from other countries are flocking here now, for the same reasons. An NRST may just stem the tide, though, which is the first positive effect I've seen that is possible from having one.
A tax on consumption that extends beyond that saved by elimination fed and FICA is hardly fruits/prosperity of labor, except for the level of income experienced by most people that post here on FR. 