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(Chicago)City sales tax to hit 9 percent June 29, 2005 Chicago's sales tax-- already the second-highest in Illinois and among the loftiest of major U.S. cities-- is headed even higher. The city's sales tax rate for most goods will rise one-quarter percentage point to 9 percent starting Friday. Some city officials and retailers say they fear Chicago stores could lose business to nearby suburbs with lower tax rates-- especially retailers on the city's outskirts, where it's easy for shoppers to drive a short distance to save a few bucks. "It will have a negligible effect on mom-and-pop businesses, but the...

1. The 23% sales tax rate turns 37%. A retailer who sells an item for $100 must charge his customer an additional $30 for federal sales tax. Most people familiar with state sales tax call this a 30% tax, since the tax is 30% of the seller's price. The Sales Tax folks call this a 23% tax, since $30 is 23% of the final price ($130 including tax), which they call the 'tax-inclusive' rate. Neither way is technically incorrect, it is just important to understand what is really being discussed. Remember this 30% tax-exclusive rate is only the federal portion...

President Bush is calling for a complete overhaul of the broken U.S. tax code, and his Advisory Panel is holding hearings to make recommendations for reform. As I testified to the Panel earlier this month, instituting the flat tax is the right answer. Our current income tax system is a catalog of favors for special interests and a chamber of horrors for the rest of America. As a country, we spend more time filing taxes than we spend building every car, truck, and van produced in the United States. To put this in perspective, it takes the average taxpayer over...

The national sales taxBruce Bartlett (back to web version) | Send May 3, 2005 According to columnist Robert Novak, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is adamant about replacing the entire federal tax system -- payroll and income taxes -- with a 30 percent national retail sales tax (NRST) collected by the states, such as that in H.R. 25, sponsored by Rep. John Linder, R-Ga.  I have written many times before about what a dopy idea I think this is. Following is an effort to summarize the key arguments against it that appear over and over again in the scholarly...

It is a rare thing when the American people can get excited about a piece of federal legislation that involves taxes. Normally, our elected officials are trying very hard to figure out how to sugarcoat yet another tax increase so they can supplement their habit of funding things like museums for ground hogs and rodeos and tropical biospheres in the farm belt. But a bill sponsored by US Representative John Linder offers a “once in a lifetime” opportunity for our lawmakers to not only do what is right by the American people, but do something that makes them look good...

The president of Intel, Paul S. Otellini, warned a federal panel addressing tax issues that because of high tax rates in the United States, his company may build its next $3 billion semiconductor factory overseas. ... "The problem that we have and which the industry has is that it costs us $1 billion more to operate inside the U.S. than outside of the country," he said. "It's not wages and capital; its almost all attributed to tax benefits--or the lack thereof--in the United States compared to what is offered elsewhere."

WASHINGTON -- The power to tax involves, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, the power to destroy. So does the power of tax reform, which is one reason why Rep. John Linder, a Georgia Republican, has a 133-page bill to replace 55,000 pages of tax rules. His bill would abolish the IRS and the many billions of tax forms it sends out and receives. He would erase the federal income tax system -- personal and corporate income taxes, the regressive payroll tax and self-employment tax, capital gains, gift and estate taxes, the alternative minimum tax and the earned income tax...

Greenspan text: sticks to tax reforms says we need to reverse the drift to an overly complicated tax code that is burdened with too high marginal rates and special provisions. Says we can increase economic efficiencies by lowering tax rates and simplifying. US needs to boost saving and consumption tax would encourage saving.

<p>WASHINGTON -- Asked when he was near death to name things he regretted not doing, Andrew Jackson said: ``I didn't shoot Henry Clay, and I didn't hang John C. Calhoun.'' President Bush, who seems determined to leave office with nothing undone -- except, maybe, horsewhipping Harry Reid -- vows to transform not only Social Security but the hydra-headed tax code.</p>

One afternoon late last month, I paid a visit to the offices of Americans for Tax Reform, the conservative lobbying outfit headed by Grover Norquist. Though Norquist ranks among the Republican Party's leading operators, neither he nor his organization is quite yet a household name. Outside the Beltway, he is known mainly, if at all, for the cheerfully visceral quotations that regularly appear next to his name in newspaper articles. (Shortly after the G.O.P.'s Election Day victory, Norquist mused to The Washington Post that the city might become less bitter and fractious now that the Democrats had been more or...

Please attend and support the FairTax!! If you will be able to make this event - you need to RSVP to the person at Heritage below. In addition, we would like to know you will be attending. Please email us at info@fairtax.org and put in the subject line - HERITAGE EVENT. Thank you! FairTax Grassroots Team 1-800-FAIRTAX The Heritage Foundation Cordially Invites You To a Luncheon Seminar *** 2360 Rayburn House Office Building*** Reforming the Tax Code: Flat Tax vs. Sales Tax Featuring For the Sales Tax: David Burton President, The Argus Group For the Flat Tax: Daniel J. Mitchell...

Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.) has authored H.R. 25 "To promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national sales tax to be administered primarily by the States." Before we look at whether a national sales tax is a good idea, how about a little Economics 101 just to convince you that government spending, not government taxation, is the true measure of governmental impact on our lives? Keeping the numbers small, suppose the annual value of what Americans produce, our gross domestic product, is $100. If government...

Why Seniors Support the FairTax Americans for Fair Taxation October 2004 The Democratic staff (House Ways and Means Committee) makes a number of errors concerning seniors. They state that seniors would be subject to “double taxation.” To tout the virtues of the income tax, they falsely claim that seniors are exempt from the payment of tax on pensions and that they can deduct medical care and long-term care. They further mislead the reader stating that seniors would be taxed on their Social Security benefits and would have to pay tax on drugs, hospital, and nursing home care, as well as...

President Bush will name a bipartisan commission in a few weeks to consider the entire range of tax reform proposals, including a flat tax or national sales levy, though the panel's summertime deadline could delay legislative action until 2006, a senior administration official said Friday. Speculation has been building for weeks about the makeup and breadth of the commission's mission, but the official told The Washington Times that the panel "won't have people who are married to either the flat tax or a national sales tax camp. It will be people who have an open mind to the future of...

Contact info: Grassley DC Fax 202-224-6020 and phone number 202-224-3744 District office number: Des Moines, 515-284-4890 Urgent Request from the Executive Director - Please call or fax Senator Grassley today. Senator Grassley needs to hear from all of us who support the FairTax - or any tax replacement or reform today. For those of you who do not have the ability to call during daylight hours - call and leave a message at his offices or fax please. Senator Grassley stated in a USA Today story : "comprehensive tax reform would be 'difficult' to do. I'm not one to spend...

Think of a world where there is no income tax, where you get to keep everything you earn and you pay the tax man when you buy stuff," said Minnesota Republican Rep. Gil Gutknecht. That's the basic premise behind a proposed national sales tax, just one of many ideas for overhauling the nation's tax code. Under a bill co-sponsored by Gutknecht and more than 50 others, all federal taxes on income would disappear, but consumers would pay a 23 percent federal sales tax on their consumption - on top of existing state taxes. Washington is abuzz with ideas after President...

MINNEAPOLIS - Rep. Gil Gutknecht is pushing legislation that would replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax. "Think of a world where there is no income tax, where you get to keep everything you earn and you pay the tax man when you buy stuff," Gutknecht, R-Minn., told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

"I'm not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it's kind of an interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously," the president said. The next day administration officials said Bush was not considering such a reform. John Kerry's campaign quickly condemned a national sales tax, and Bush for potentially supporting it. “If [Bush] has his way, every trip to the supermarket will feel like a visit to H&R Block and every day will be April 15. And now that this plan has been exposed, George W. Bush is trying to mislead...

There was a moment, about two weeks ago, when it looked like South Carolina Democrats might make it a race for the U.S. Senate. Inez Tenenbaum — their candidate to replace Fritz Hollings — was reaping the benefits of a smart, well-financed campaign. She was successfully spinning Rep. Jim DeMint's support for replacing the income tax with a national sales tax as a tax hike on South Carolina families. And DeMint wasn't doing himself any favors with kooky comments about banning unwed mothers and homosexuals from public-school classrooms. Thanks to these converging events, there was a moment when Tenenbaum...

LET'S DEMAGOGUE THE FAIR TAX Perhaps you noticed that in quite a few congressional races around the country Democratic candidates have been attempting to frighten voters into believing that the evil Republican candidate is going to burden them with a horrible new tax. More specifically, the wicked Republican is going to add a 23% federal retail sales tax on everything they buy .. and this is in addition to all the other taxes they're already paying! Effective politics? You bet! Can you imagine how frightened some middle or lower income American would be at the prospect of paying another 23...