The Fair Tax: The Time is Now - Items to Ponder
In the coming days and weeks the majority of my time will be spent on explaining the FairTax of which I am utmost passionate about. Barak Obama and Hillary (McCain isn't much better for that matter) is right that Washington needs change, but he is wrong about the type of change. We don't need more government intervention in our lives.
Instead we need the single largest shift of power to the people in the history of our great country to save our Republic. This issue is not about being a conservative, liberal, libertarian, Democrat, or Republican. It is about being concerned for the sake of America's future economic and national security. The issue I speak of is the Fair Tax.
Before I start telling you what the Fair Tax is, here are a few things to ponder.
- On March 9th of 2005 David Walker, Comptroller General of the US Government Accountability Office offered testimony to the House Committee on Ways and Means stating that at the rate of current taxation and Congressional discretionary spending, by 2040 the government will no longer be able to pay the interest on the federal debt, meaning our country will be bankrupt and will no longer be able to provide any government services because every cent of tax money will be spent to pay the interest of our national debt.
- Dr. Larry Kotlikoff of the Economics Dept. at Boston University has shown that to fix Social Security and Medicare permanently it will cost us $74,000,000,000,000 by 2030 (that $74 trillion if you don't want to count up the zero's). The current net worth of every household in America is around $45 trillion, so to pay it off the government will have to take every item from your house, cars, CD's, books, savings, investments, absolutely everything and they would still only be able to pay 60% of the debt off. Clearly we don't have the money.
- Democrats and some liberal Republicans preach out against corporations who have record profits and low taxes and insist that corporations should pay higher taxes. Well, who do you think really pays for those taxes and where do the jobs go that the citizens of Ohio made such an issue in their primary this past week? Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. Milton Friedman knows and it has nothing to do with NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement). I'll leave you to ponder that for a few days when I address this question in my series about the Fair Tax.
- The current "heavy progressive or graduated income tax system" takes its founding from none other than Karl Marx, the founder of Communist ideology, as written in the Communist Manifesto. This is the second step of ten to form a Communist state. Wouldn't he be proud?
- Finally, the thoughts of two distinguished men.
- "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves [generous benefits] from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
- From Alexander Fraser Tytler's The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic.
- "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic" (referring to the United States).
- Benjamin Franklin
- Our current tax system has over 64,000 pages of regulations and statutes that are so complicated your chance of a correct tax submission if you do it on your own is near 0%, your chance of getting an accurate answer from an IRS agent on a tax question is less than 40%, and 2 out of every 3 American will be forced to pay professionals large sums of money to complete their tax submission. To top it off in 2002, the economic impact it cost just to collect taxes for compliance was around $500 billion just to collect $950 billion in federal income taxes. Talk about a highly inefficient process (for every $1.90 collected it cost the US economy $1 in compliance costs).
I have heard all too often, that "It sounds like a great idea, but it won't happen." A majority of colonists in colonial America took this stance during the Revolutionary War (thankfully George Washington and a few righteous men stood up to seemingly insurmountable odds). Change can happen, all it takes are voices to be heard.
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To take action now go to changedc.org or visit fairtax.org to sign a petition that will be presented to our elected officials and political candidates on Tax Day 2008 (April 15th for those of you not in the know). Let your voice be heard. For more information or to see other ways you can join millions of other supporters around the country in spreading the message about the Fair Tax now, visit fairtax.org or pick up one of the two books written by Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder that are listed in my "Try Reading Something" section.
