Tax Preparation
It’s almost April 15th… have you filed your tax return?
Of all the government intrusions, I rate this the highest. Not paying taxes (so long as they are reasonable)… FIGURING OUT how much tax is due! The ACT of preparing a tax return (or PAYING someone to do it). The tax code is too complex… unnecessarily so… and the ONLY REASON it continues is to empower politicians and their lobbying supporters. The current income tax code exists only to benefit special interest groups.
It’s time for The FairTax Act (HR 25, S 296), which is nonpartisan legislation. Here are their Frequenty Asked Questions page that will quickly describe a very well-thought-out plan to REPLACE the way taxes are collected. In a nutshell, The Fair Tax:
- Eliminates income tax along with all deductions, etc… replaces that revenue with a simple sales tax. No more filing tax returns.
- Provides a “prebate” which pays the federal sales tax up to a certain amount… so lower income people don’t have to pay unfairly.
- Everyone would know the federal tax rate… at a glance. Politicians could no longer manipulate taxes through deductions, exemptions, and other “slick” political methods.
- Enforcement would be easier since the number of businesses collecting taxes would be far lower than the number of individuals in our country.
- Does not change the AMOUNT of taxes collected… that’s a different battle… it only changes the WAY taxes are collected
Think about it… while you will pay more tax when you buy things, the cost of those items would not include corporate taxes AND you will have more money to spend since no taxes are withheld from your paycheck. The net price of the things we buy would be about the same.
Not to mention the HUGE DRAG ON OUR ECONOMY that “compliance” imposes… the time, effort, and expense of collecting the information and filing the necessary paperwork costs the U.S. more than $250 BILLION PER YEAR! In our tough economic times, this is one way to take an anchor off our economy that is costing us all a huge amount of money and returning absolutely nothing.
Here’s an interesting article that also indicates the time is right. I do disagree with that author’s point #3. The LAST thing we want is for taxes to be “invisible to the general public”… we WANT to have transparency in our taxation system. What we DO want is to make paying taxes as easy, quick, and unobtrusive as possible. Perhaps that’s what the author really meant, though.
Most of us pay sales taxes now, so it’s a familiar routine… a federal sales tax would just change the amount… but we can also look right on the receipt and know exactly how much tax we paid. The Fair Tax would take away a lot of the power Congress has to manipulate taxes… which gives more power to US!
