Free Republic

I consider myself to be fairly liberal on most issues. So some of you might be surprised that I am about to take a position that’s usually the providence of hardcore conservatives. I support HR25—the Fair Tax Act of 2005. Yeah. The one that would replace virtually the entire tax system with a 23% sales tax. I read about it most recently in an unnecessarily hostile editorial by Matthew Holmes. Truth be told, his article did nothing to convince me that the tax is a good thing. But it convinced me to wade through the full text of the legislation,...

The current Tax Code is a mess and needs to be eliminated. The best chance for full-scale reform is the FairTax. The Fair Tax Act repeals corporate and personal income taxes, payroll taxes, gift taxes, death taxes, capital gains taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes. The FairTax is a revenue neutral sales tax paid at the point of final purchase would be the replacement tax system. Used products would not be taxed. Rebate checks tied to the poverty level would be issued to taxpayers -- eliminating taxes on basic necessities. Whereas, the burden of calculating and filing complicated income tax...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- It's hard to find anybody who thinks taxes are fair, but the idea of a fair tax has been a hot topic this political season. When thousands of people crowded around Orlando City Hall in July, they made it clear that they think the IRS and income taxes must go. They support the fair tax -- a bill in the U.S. Congress that would replace the income tax system with a national sales tax, WESH 2 News reported. That means everything you buy would include 23 percent federal tax, in addition to any county or state sales...

A couple of points: The GAO (Congress's auditing branch) found that all of the exemptions, exclusions, and special favors in the current tax code drain federal receipts by $728 billion each year. That is almost as much as the nation spends on Medicare and Social Security combined and 60% more than the nation spends on national defense. The FairTax eliminates all deductions, credits, and carve-outs to ensure that everyone pays his or her fair share. and: The Department of Commerce reports in its most recent Economic Census that just 688 retailers (0.03%) in the U.S. make 48.6% of all the...

Ron Deval - boomer, ecologist, humanist, peacenik, political agnostic and unapologetically Canadian - has a surprise for fans of all causes liberal. Reliably left on most issues, Deval is nonetheless passionate about a tax revolution whose growing army is populated largely by conservatives and libertarians. Describing himself as an "advocate of things that favor humanity," Deval is, in short, a Fair Tax maniac. Encouragingly, the Land O' Lakes man is not just another guy with an opinion and a couple of Web sites. He can navigate a spread sheet. After about 20 years designing programs that helped wealthy clients of...

FAIRTAX STATUS REPORT The FairTax movement is going strong my friends, stronger than you might imagine. I can assure you that the FairTax is attracting an ever-increasing degree of attention in Washington. I wish I could share the details, but the wonderful world of politics is such that it is much better to let the people involved spill the beans than to jump the gun by disclosing their interest or involvement ahead of time. There have been three events in recent months that have really peaked interest among the political class. First was the debut of The FairTax Book on...

The FairTax was on the primary ballots in three Georgia counties yesterday. I have the results of the voting! Here you go. Gwinnett County: Total Votes: 35,755 Yes - 31,068. 86.9% No - 4,687 13.1% Cobb County: Total votes: 39,458 Yes - 33,598. 85.15% No - 5,860. 14.85% Fayette County: Total votes: 11,517 Yes - 9,828. 85.33% No - 1,689. 14.67% According to Boortz the results of this vote will be personally handed to President Bush today via a Washington insider. The purpose of which is to convey the FACT that there is great support for this solution to current...

Raise your hand if you feel that you as an individual are adequately represented in Washington when it comes to taxation. You in the back. The one with your hand up. You can leave now. Raise your hand if would like to have total control over how much of your hard earned money goes to the federal government. You on the left. Yeah you with your hand down. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Those of us still here are going to talk about a revolution. We are going to talk about changing the power equation...

Illegal Immigrants and Others Working Off the Books Cost the U.S. Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in Unpaid TaxesAmerica has two economies: First, there's the legitimate economy, in which craftsmen are licensed and employers and employees pay taxes. Then there's the fast-growing underground economy, where millions of nannies, construction workers, landscapers and others are paid off the books, their incomes largely untaxed. The best guess as to the size of the output of this shadow economy is about $970 billion, or nearly 9% that of the real economy. It could soon pass $1 trillion. What is largely fueling the underground...

The June 22 People's Forum letter captioned "That raise won't help" made valid points about increasing workers' wages by increasing production of goods and services. In order to increase production and create jobs, we need to enhance economic growth. An artificial minimum wage won't accomplish that. One way of initiating effective economic growth requires replacing what retards growth with what enhances it. One factor that retards economic growth is the tax code. Businesses recover their tax expenditures and tax compliance costs by passing them down to consumers and workers with inflated prices, lower wages and benefits, and finally by hiring...

I noted with interest the letter to the editor from Mr. Ed Outlaw with his concerns for the Fair Tax plan. I have promoted the Fair Tax for several years now, and I have rarely come across anyone that was such a proponent of the present tax system. The Income Tax is out of control, inefficient, and penalizes U.S. business and manufacturing competing within an escalating global economy. The Fair Tax is a simple alternative method to fund the Federal Government that is fair, simple, and visible. As a by-product, it just happens to solve some very serious economic problems...

Some people in the Roanoke and New River Valleys are fed up with the current tax system. Those folks met in Salem Saturday. The Fair Tax event was part of a grassroots effort to spread the word about the tax alternative. This afternoon, Genie Hayes, grassroots director of Fair Tax, taught folks how to interact with the media and how to network and educate others. She says the Fair Tax plan seems to draw backing from folks who fall between the current tax cracks and those who feel like they're being ripped off. "It's a progressive national sales tax that...

If there's one thing we know about here in Muleshoe, it's "fairness". Folks around here are pretty much about the fairest that you'll ever find (at least in far-West Texas). When Fred and Frieda got to chewing the fat with me down at the new Civic Center (it usta' be the feed store, but we've upgraded), they kept asking me "What's so fair about a tax on income?". Now that's a real toughie once you think about it and I tried to get an answer from several congressmen so I could really write an informed editorial about it. The more...

James thought you might be interested in this video on Yahoo! Video: Chuck Anher Fairtax CandidateJames added this message: You need to watch this video. It proves that the Fairtax is picking up steam.

FairTax Strikes Back - Introduction On April 8, 2003 I wrote my first article on the FairTax proposal. The article FairTax - Income Taxes vs. Sales Taxes detailed the costs and benefits of moving from a system of income taxes to a system of sales taxes. In the article I concluded that "[the]FairTax is an interesting proposal which is unlikely to ever be implemented." The response I received to this article was overwhelming. I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of e-mails on the article, every last one of them from a FairTax supporter. While many of the supporters had something negative...

Support seems to be growing for the FairTax, which would allow Americans to keep 100 percent of their salaries and pay taxes only on what they consume. The FairTax would do away with the onerous, abusive Internal Revenue Service with its 54,000 pages of confusing tax laws -- so confusing that you can ask eight IRS employees the same question and get eight different answers -- so confusing that just to comply with the federal income tax costs Americans $225 billion (conservative estimate). That's $225 billion, before you even start paying the tax itself. Doing away with the federal income...

FairTax Rally and a special invitation to you You are invited as special guests and participants to the Neal Boortz FairTax Rally to be held May 24th at the Gwinnett Convention Center outside Atlanta. Not only will this rally feature Congressman John Linder, WSB talk show host Neal Boortz, and FOX News star and conservative commentator Sean Hannity, but also FairTax.org leaders will be on hand, as well as FairTax activist and leader Herman Cain. The goal of this rally, which will be broadcast nationally on Sean Hannity's FOX program, “Hannity & Colmes,” is to "kick up" the heat on...

In my letter to Rep. Linder and Mr. Boortz of August 24, 2005, I pointed out a number of what I called “serious misrepresentations” of the Fair Tax plan contained in “The FairTax Book”. I specifically named many of these by page #. Now that the revised second issue is out, let’s see what they did to these passages in the book: First edition page 55, you go on to explain that these embedded taxes are “in addition to the money taken out of your check in income and payroll taxes.” Second edition- this line was eliminated. This means that...

It already works in two U.S. states — Florida and Texas — that have two of the top 20 economies in the world. South Carolina is one of 46 states in the nation that already have a mechanism in place for collecting a sales tax. McWilliams conceded that 23 percent seems like a lot to pay in federal sales tax. But he said economic studies show that most American families pay more than that into the federal government under the current IRS-monitored system. “The rich will still buy expensive items and be taxed accordingly,” he said, “but the middle class...

EDMOND— How much of your time and money did you spend getting your taxes filed this year? Your time is worth something even if you use a software program to do your taxes. Your time is worth something gathering up all the information to give to your hired tax preparer. Multiply that by the number of taxpayers and corporate taxpayers and you can plainly see how much a burden our current tax code is on the taxpayers of America. You can get mad, just like I do each middle of April, but the inevitable has to occur. Did you know...