As regular readers are aware, I am very much in favor of the National Retail Sales Tax, also known as the Fair Tax. However, to be fair, I am including an article today from Bruce Bartlett where he lists several reasons why they National Retail Sales Tax is a bad idea. He makes some good points and raises some issues that I believe will need to be addressed.
That said, it is important to recognize that there will never be a flawless tax system. The nature of taxes goes against the nature of individuals. Most people will innately seek ways to reduce their tax liability so as to keep as much of their own money as possible. Government, though, does need some taxes to perform its duties. The difficult part of government, then, is discovering the best method to collect the taxes needed that is least oppressive to the individual citizens.
Our current tax system is broken. Besides being very evasive into the private lives of the citizenry, it is not fair. There are so many loopholes and exceptions that even the IRS can't decide how to compute what a person's tax liability is. The poor don't pay income taxes while the rich hire CPAs and tax lawyers to discover ways to pay less. The middle class (that's me and you) get stuck working very hard and handing over 25% of that money to the government for it to waste.
Our current tax system is not only broken, it is also morally wrong. The using of force to remove any money from a person's paycheck before they even get it is a form of slavery. God created man and gave him life (this is our inalienable right to life). God endowed man with the freedom to choose what to do with that life (this is our inalienable right to liberty). Each individual person is the master of his own destiny. Now, as a person pursues his destiny, he invests his life to learn skills. He then enters into a contract with other men in which he will exchange his skills and his time (i.e., a portion of his life) in return for some of the other guy's property (i.e., a paycheck, money). When government swoops in and confinscates a portion of that property it is in actuality confiscating a portion of the workers life. In other words, the worker has involuntarily worked for the benefit of the government instead of the benefit of himself. Isn't that the definition of slavery. Slavery is when one person is forced to work while the fruits of that labor go to another person. The income tax does just that. You work, but some politician any Washington collects the fruit of that work. That is wrong, wrong, wrong!
Then, when you take into consideration that our income tax is progressive it becomes even more reprehensible. One of the basic values of our nation is that all men are created equal and should be treated equally before the law. In other words, the government should not give individuals special consideration when enforcing the laws based on ethnic origin, gender, religion, sexual preference, intelligence, height, weight, hair color, eye shape, baldness, or any other trait, including ability to generate income. To make people who work harder, chose to learn certain high-valued skills, or whatever pay more in income taxes is to not treat the individuals equally.
All people who benefit from government should pay some part of it. A flat-rate, applied to everyone is perhaps the most fair way to do an income tax (except an income tax is morally wrong). Because I think an income tax is morally wrong, whether it is a flat-tax or a progressive scale, and I think that there is a legitimate need for the government to collect taxes, then I support the National Retail Sales Tax, despite the problems raised by Bruce Bartlett. However, I will support any reform method to fix our broken, unfair, oppressive, and immoral tax system.
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