| Could a new tax law change our lives forever? |
Brad Jackman
JAC01016@BYUI.EDU
Scroll Staff |
Imagine no IRS, no income tax, no Medicare or Social Security taxes. You get to take home the whole paycheck. That’s right: no withholdings. Imagine a system that gets rid of 60,000 pages of tax code and replaces it with an easy-to-understand tax system.
April 15th. It could be just another spring day, but the very mention of the date sends chills down the spine. This could all change soon, if a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives is passed. It’s H.R. 25, better known as the FairTax Bill.
Eliminating these taxes also reduces product prices. About 22 percent of a product’s price is a company’s tax passed on to the consumer. When corporate taxes are abolished, consumer prices will drop by the same amount due to competition.
So where does the money come from? With the current tax system completely abolished, a national sales tax on new goods and services takes its place. It requires no paperwork and no headache.
The FairTax replaces all tax systems with a 23 percent retail sales tax, and with product prices dropping over 20 percent, it’s just pennies over what you pay for a product now.
The bill isn’t a tax cut — it’s a tax reform. You’ll pay approximately the same amount of taxes, but the benefits to America as a whole will be enormous.
Billions of hours and dollars spent preparing taxes will be turned into building our economy. American companies that fled overseas due to a punishing tax system will come running back, along with foreign companies. This will bring jobs, innovation and money back to the United States.
The reason you probably haven’t heard about the FairTax is that some politicians in Washington are trying to keep a lid on the program. It’s getting stiff competition, even though supporters include Alan Greenspan, President Bush, dozens of members of Congress, and University economists from Harvard, MIT, Boston, Stanford and many other universities.
Democrats argue that the bill will unfairly tax the poor, making them pay the same amount of tax as the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth. The FairTax ensures that a check is sent to each household every month covering the tax burden for necessary items. A single person would receive $183 a month at current rates, a married couple with four children, $491.
The truly poor who spend very little actually make money off the FairTax, in addition to whatever welfare benefits they already receive.
The president’s staff stated that the FairTax treated the poor better than our current system, or any other proposed system.
Others argue that the amount of revenue will short-change the government. Also not true. The 23 percent sales tax covers all current government income, plus the universal tax rebate, and the costs of administering such a program.
Twenty years of study, planning, revision and testing have gone into the bi-partisan creation of the FairTax, and yet democrats in Congress are still blocking the progression of the bill as a partisan effort.
The truth is that this bill will not benefit politicians, it will benefit the people. It’s time for Americans to educate themselves on the issues, call their representative and force representative government to truly represent the people.
Learn about the FairTax Bill at www.fairtax.org, then call your representative and tell him or her how you feel. If all goes well in Congress by 2007, April 15th could be just another spring day.
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