Fair Tax
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By -
As many of you know, we are in the middle of tax return season. This is the one opportunity we get to check the work of the government to make sure that they took out the appropriate amount of taxes based on the laws that our government wrote, and agencies (like the IRS) have clarified and whether or not they took out too much, or not enough. Then we send it off to the government to check our grade and if they like it, they issue a refund or take extra money. If they don’t believe our grade (which is rare), they have us sit down and double check their double checking. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that gives me a headache. There has to be an easier way to take care of this issue.
If you have read the Times-Union in the past, I have already pointed out that there is a better way to pay taxes. The FairTax Act of 2015 (HR 25/S. 155) does just that. It replaces every federal withholding tax and replaces it with a simple consumption tax that is paid for one time, on every new good and service at American businesses. Dinner at a local restaurant with the family? Pay the tax. Paying the NIPSCO bill? Pay the tax. New car? Pay a tax. Buying a 1986 Toyota Corolla from a used car dealership because you totaled your new one in a Hoosier deer hunt (running it over with your car – probably a phrase that will not catch on)? That is tax free! Items that are used have already had the tax paid and will not be collected in a second transaction.
The FairTax also knows that you also need necessities of life in order to survive (food, medicine, etc.). What happens is all citizens are able to receive from the federal government a prebate equating to the sales taxes a family would spend per month – up to the federal poverty level. For example, a household with two adults, and two children would receive 611 dollars every month. Isn’t that better than one large refund, once a year?
Some people might say, “Why not pay a percentage of your income every year, and that rate is uniform for everyone?” Well a person who makes 18K a year is going to miss a lot more of their money than a person like Bill Gates who makes billions per year. The FairTax actually benefits the poor because the rich consume more, and the rich have a tendency to purchase new goods, new items, and therefore they’re going to pay more in taxes. Plus the burden for making sure the tax is paid shifts to the approximately 2 million businesses in the United States, and not the 146 million individuals that our current system (or a proposed flat tax) uses.
With the FairTax, we eliminate paperwork for individuals, we eliminate guessing, we eliminate the need for special tax rules that lobbyists buy from Congress, and we eliminate one of the biggest wastes of government in the IRS. For more information, go to www.fairtax.org
Gary Eppenbaugh
Warsaw, via email[[In-content Ad]]
As many of you know, we are in the middle of tax return season. This is the one opportunity we get to check the work of the government to make sure that they took out the appropriate amount of taxes based on the laws that our government wrote, and agencies (like the IRS) have clarified and whether or not they took out too much, or not enough. Then we send it off to the government to check our grade and if they like it, they issue a refund or take extra money. If they don’t believe our grade (which is rare), they have us sit down and double check their double checking. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that gives me a headache. There has to be an easier way to take care of this issue.
If you have read the Times-Union in the past, I have already pointed out that there is a better way to pay taxes. The FairTax Act of 2015 (HR 25/S. 155) does just that. It replaces every federal withholding tax and replaces it with a simple consumption tax that is paid for one time, on every new good and service at American businesses. Dinner at a local restaurant with the family? Pay the tax. Paying the NIPSCO bill? Pay the tax. New car? Pay a tax. Buying a 1986 Toyota Corolla from a used car dealership because you totaled your new one in a Hoosier deer hunt (running it over with your car – probably a phrase that will not catch on)? That is tax free! Items that are used have already had the tax paid and will not be collected in a second transaction.
The FairTax also knows that you also need necessities of life in order to survive (food, medicine, etc.). What happens is all citizens are able to receive from the federal government a prebate equating to the sales taxes a family would spend per month – up to the federal poverty level. For example, a household with two adults, and two children would receive 611 dollars every month. Isn’t that better than one large refund, once a year?
Some people might say, “Why not pay a percentage of your income every year, and that rate is uniform for everyone?” Well a person who makes 18K a year is going to miss a lot more of their money than a person like Bill Gates who makes billions per year. The FairTax actually benefits the poor because the rich consume more, and the rich have a tendency to purchase new goods, new items, and therefore they’re going to pay more in taxes. Plus the burden for making sure the tax is paid shifts to the approximately 2 million businesses in the United States, and not the 146 million individuals that our current system (or a proposed flat tax) uses.
With the FairTax, we eliminate paperwork for individuals, we eliminate guessing, we eliminate the need for special tax rules that lobbyists buy from Congress, and we eliminate one of the biggest wastes of government in the IRS. For more information, go to www.fairtax.org
Gary Eppenbaugh
Warsaw, via email[[In-content Ad]]
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