How To Defund The IRS? Top 10 Reasons For A National Sales Tax Bob Maistros
Let’s pick up where our IRS-defunding I&I editorial board brethren lately left off: “There is … a better way to fund federal operations. Move to a single-rate income tax paid monthly with no deductions and no withholding, or implement a national sales tax.”
This commentator chooses National Sales Tax for several trillion dollars, Alex. While he has engaged in many exercises to explain why that levy solves a whole range of problems, here are some highlights in Lettermanesque fashion – the Top 10 Reasons for a National Sales Tax:
10. Keep it simple, stupid! Flat tax or no, the biggest problem with an income tax: it’s on income. The complexity and intrusion relates to determining what is and isn’t, and tracking, income.
Uncle Sam gets to snoop on hundreds of millions of taxpayers to make sure you’re not hiding income. Admittedly, for most taxpayers calculations get simpler without deductions, exemptions and the like. But eliminating withholding would only increase demands for government to stick its nose into your business to ensure you’re not getting money under the table. Especially for the self-employed.
Even many employees get income from multiple sources, including savings and investments. The revenooers want all those records, plus taxpayers will also have to pay monthly to account for non-payroll sources. Who’s going to tell them how much? Certainly not the IRS. Citizens will overpay to be safe, still being stuck with near-compulsory overcharges.
Moreover, what about the corporate income tax? Twenty-seven million private companies generate billions of calculations and pages of required record-keeping. Will that tax also be flat? Gucci Gulch is guffawing.
A sales tax? One number for companies: percentage of sales. For consumers? No record-keeping, filing, or engaging professional help to pay a bill for a service. And no spying on individuals or companies other than sales income.
9. Jobs, jobs, jobs. The second reason taxing income (and payrolls) stinks: your government taxes work and hiring. While paying people not to work. Madness.
Leveraging a sales tax to eliminate business as well individual income taxation would generate a historic supply-side growth spurt, making re-shoring of jobs back to flyover country a near-imperative.
8. Decoupling: That onshoring would advance a long-needed decoupling from our enemies in China. ‘Nuff said.
7. Transparency + skin in the game = fiscal discipline. Worried about government spending and debt limits? Show America exactly how much it pays for government.
Even under a flat individual tax, the cost of government will be different for every taxpayer, embedded in every price via business taxes paid, economic distortions/lost productivity and mind-boggling compliance and avoidance costs: buildings full of accountants and lawyers angling big companies’ tax bills down to zero.
With a sales tax, it’s one number: some percentage of sales appearing on receipts for every purchase. Presumably, Republicans would drive that number lower than Democrats, spurring voters to comparison-shop and demand fiscal discipline. By the way, it’s why this pundit no longer favors versions of the FAIR Tax wiping out tax liability for lower-income Americans. Skin in the game is essential to changing voters’ calculus regarding Big Government.
6. Disinflation. Washing out of prices the hidden costs of government and economic distortions would make everything cheaper, and again, government’s actual cost easier to see.
5. True equity. Let’s talk fairness: productive Americans will still pay most income taxes. With the sales tax, everyone pays the same percentage – and benefits from a stronger economy and cheaper goods.
4. Entitlement bills coming due. Again, don’t forget payroll taxes. Pending insolvency means Social Security and Medicare benefits will be cut (again) and payroll/self-employment taxes raised (again). Moreover, another current code inanity: taxing people for saving. Uncoupling old-age programs from payroll taxes will allow a re-thinking – ideally, privatization. And incentivize individuals to salt away more for their futures.
3. Less debt. One major reason for the 2008 financial crisis, the current bank failures panic and recent layoffs within Big Tech: market distortions from favoring debt financing over equity. Plus dipsy-doodling with incentivized borrowing makes corporate balance sheets indecipherable.
2. Family formation. Letting families decide to keep more of their own money, plus restoring well-paying jobs for men in particular, will make it more conceivable for strained Gen Z couples to marry and, pun intended, conceive. Which is critical as drying-up fertility is already wreaking drastic economic and fiscal consequences.
1. More power –– and privacy and freedom – to you. Think the government is the biggest problem facing America today? Wait until its full might is unleashed by an increasingly tyrannical, spendthrift leadership.
Big Tech, Big Business and Cancel Culture can isolate and deprive you. But as your I&I editorialists made clear, Big Brother, with its whip hand, the income tax, allowing seizure of wealth and untrammeled intrusion into private lives, can crush you.
The exposure of an ex-president’s tax returns reinforces that citizens have no privacy and no rights. They came for conservative advocacy groups first. They came for The Donald next. Rest assured, they will come for you next.
For these 10 reasons and hundreds more, it’s time to come for the IRS instead. Long past.
Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.
Comments are closed.
