And the Fair Tax is going to fix that? Personal financial planning is what fixes that. You know, personal responsibility? You sound like you would like to control people’s over-spending as much as the progs want to control success.

GB., “Small ticket items “that can be sold out of the back of a van” is known as free enterprise… is it a loss in regulation you fear?”

You don’t get it do you? Here in Washington State we have an onerous sales tax on cigarettes. There is a big black market in cigarettes here as a result. The state is collecting much less in tax revenue than if they would lower the taxes. But they won’t because smoking is one of the progs socially unapproved activities. (As an aside, they have approved smoking of marijuana with a much more reasonable tax – doesn’t compute to me.) People would also enter into barter arrangements to save paying so much tax. People would not buy anything new except day to day necessities if they could help it. When your taxes will be roughly doubled by passage of a poorly thought out tax scheme, as mine would be, you start to look into the ramifications more closely. If I would change my retail buying habits to pay less tax, why wouldn’t others? Less economic activity means fewer jobs. The Fair Tax is a lot like Communism. It is supposed to provide a new, FAIR way to finance the government. When it stifles economic activity they will wonder what the H**L happened.

All tax schemes are a pain in the ass. Our present scheme is too complex and too loaded toward the top 25% of earners, but it could be revised to make it simpler and flatter. The Fair Tax is uncharted territory – there be dragons there.

Daniel in Brookline, “There are many aspects of the current tax system that bother me. But one of the most bothersome, in my opinion, is that there are so many wrong answers and no right answers.”

Sounds like you may have owned some shares in Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) I now refuse to own them (even though they are mostly good investments) because of the tax issues. Only tax preparers who specialize in them can provide a reasonably safe and accurate tax return. And those specialists are not cheap. Not for small investors like me anyway. That’s why a first step would be to simplify the code. The MLPs are basically set up to allow businesses to pass through the maximum return to the shareholders along with some of the tax benefits of being in business. With a 10% corporate or business tax, that would no longer make sense. There are even more esoteric things than MLPs, but all are designed to provide some loopholes to some group. That is where simplification comes in. But it will be hard. Too may oxen gored.

I appreciate your opinion. I just disagree with it.

5-10% and you start seeing some interesting gray and black market activities, bartering and tax evasion. More than that, and it gets to the point where lawyers or some other company profits because a lot of work and jobs are created just to calculate taxations and how to avoid them.

I have read the books, studied the issue, and it comes up short. The libertarian bias of Boortz and others of the same mindset create the assumption that all citizens are willing to be fleeced during commercial transactions. The Fair Tax would approximately double my taxes. Do you think I’m not going to devise any strategy I can to decrease them? Multiply me by 100 million others and you have a recipe for destruction of the economy and decreased tax receipts. Figure out what you would actually be paying under that plan and then decide what you would have to do to pay less. It means you would buy less of everything. It would stifle the economy.

http://www.amazon.com/Fair-Tax-Book-Saying-Goodbye/dp/0060875496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421852283&sr=8-1&keywords=Fair+tax

http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Answering-Critics-Neal-Boortz/dp/0061540463/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1421852283&sr=8-2&keywords=Fair+tax

For quick information go to the Fair Tax website. They do a good job of explaining it and answer a lot of questions. The books go into even more detail. The first one lays it out, the second one answers the critics.

http://fairtax.org

This proposal is easy to distort by its opponents, but you should take the time to find out what it is about for yourself. Don’t listen to the naysayers, learn for yourself. It is worth the time. To the people who say “we could never get this passed”, I say you won’t if you don’t try. Do you like what we have now?

A national sales tax was what the founders originally authorized in the Constitution. We should give it a try again.

Imagine going to George Washington or Benjamin Franklin and telling them they are not free to offer their labor or pay for another’s labor directly. Imagine telling them the government will first tell them how much of that wage they will be permitted to keep?! It is anathema to all they fought for and all they created.

I certainly like the Flat Tax more than the absurdity we have now, but it fails on the level of principle. Once we agree the Federal Government holds sway over our private dealings with others for labor, we cede our freedom to the Federal Government. The only tax that fits our ideal of Federal Government is a consumption tax.

Make Congress fight for every dime they get. If they want a new agency, new staff, a new war, new regulations… they will first have to determine what new tax they will levy, or existing tax they will raise. And the people involved in those industries will fight them every step of the way, as it should be.