The Fair Tax Book

Neal Boortz and John Linder’s book The FairTax Book came out this week and has been selling great, which is just awesome. If you are a taxpayer (and I don’t just mean the people who end up having to pay every April 15, but even those who get excited about the money that the government seems to give them at that time of the year, which was theirs in the first place), you should read this book.

I already knew how the Fair Tax (H.R. 25, originally introduced in 1999 by Linder) works before reading this book, but now I have a much more entailed understanding of it. If you are unfamiliar with it, the idea is that the income tax would be replaced with a national sales tax (expected rate: 23%). That probably sounds scary, but about 22% of what you pay for anything now is the imbedded cost of our current tax system. It would probably only take a month or so for prices to end up about what they were before, but with the advantage of you keeping your entire paycheck instead of 50-80% of it.

This system also untaxes the poor, who are paying the 22% imbedded tax cost in whatever they buy now, even if they have no other tax responsibilities, while most still pay FICA and Social Security, too. The way this happens is that every household gets a prebate at the beginning of each month to cover the cost of taxes on spending up to poverty level for their household size for that month.

There are so many benefits to this system, ones that stand to improve the American economy by leaps and bounds, covered in great detail in this book that you absolutely MUST read. Even if you already know about the Fair Tax, there is still plenty this book has to offer. For instance, it provides a history of the income tax. I didn’t know that an income tax was originally prohibited by the Bill of Rights. Once the income tax got started, it got worse and worse. Seems to me that the lawmakers didn’t think they could get elected on their beliefs and priorities and abilities alone, so they needed money to throw around to buy votes, and since the government does not generate its own money but just takes it from us, they had to find a way to get more and more of it.

I don’t think anyone with a decently functioning brain who reads this book with an open mind will have any doubt that this is a better system than what we have by far. All the typical complaints you hear about this system (usually made through either misinformation or intentional lies) are addressed in detail in this book.

In this country we have people who like to take any new idea and tear it to shreds, pointing out all the bad things about it, talking about how terrible it is. No Child Left Behind is an example – all I ever seem to hear about is NCLB is complaints about how holding underprivileged schools accountable is unfair, that actually carrying out the warned reduction of funding when they fail to meet standards is mean, that it stifles fun and creativity in schools, that it isn’t working in certain places, etc. NCLB is not perfect, but at least they’re trying to do something to fix the problem with our country’s education system. Unless you have a better suggestion, shut up with the griping. It’s like that commercial where there’s a piece of litter on the sidewalk and all these people stop and stare at it and complain about how terrible it is that someone would litter, talk about how someone should do something, etc, all while accomplishing nothing.

Fair Tax is like that to me. Maybe someday we could come up with something that’s an even better system, but the Fair Tax is far better than our current system, is the most fair to the most people, and most benefits the country. So people need to stop bellyaching and speculating about what things could go wrong, and especially need to stop twisting elements of HR 25 around to scare voters into thinking it’s bad. And some goofy Democrats need to stop lamenting the fact that this wasn’t their party’s baby and just do what’s best for the country.