April 15, 2009

Please Stop Advocating The Fair Tax

I'm watching Boortz and Huckabee talk about the Fair Tax on Hannity. Hearing them makes me realize I've got more work to do to teach you, the good people of America, not just about our current backwards tax system, but the backwards proposals that are being presented as solutions.

The Fair Tax, as just explained by Neal Boortz, is the replacement of income taxes with a consumption-style national sales tax. My argument against such a system is simple, and lights the way to the only ethical tax system. The argument is this:

The cost of governing you is not proportional to the amount of money you spend.

The key factor of the question "how much should you be taxed?" should be obvious...

How much does it cost to govern you?

The Fair Tax's answer to this question is: "the more you spend, the higher is the cost of governing you." Which, when you put it that way, is pretty dumb.

How much does it cost to govern you?

Is the cost of defending the nation proportional to the amount of money you spend? No. It's proportional the level of threat we're faced with.

The notion that the government needs more money when you or I spend more is stupid. In fact, it's no better than our current system. It only moves the tax collector from employers to retailers. It doesn't solve the real problem. It picks some amount of money arbitrarily and throws it at Washington, who then figures out how to spend it (this is the one thing that government does well).

The only way we will free ourselves from the slavery of burdensome government is when government is restricted to an enumerated list of responsibilities. With an enumerated list responsibilities, the cost of governing each individual will be easy to calculate. Once the number is calculated, government can simply send us each a bill equal to our share -- everyone pays the same amount.

The sexy feature of such a system is that the number only needs to change when the enumerated list of responsibilities changes. The only way a tax increase could ever occur is when our government tweaks that list. The tax rate won't go up proportional to the size of the population, since the cost of governing is calculated on a per-person basis. The bill could even include an accounting of what each cent goes to. No more earmarks. No more hiden costs. No more immoral government.

Let's stop rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic -- let's stop playing the tax collector shell game -- let's stop the government from pissing down our backs and telling us it's raining.

Let's secure Liberty for ourselves and our posterity as our founding fathers did so many years ago.

Posted by Richard at April 15, 2009 6:26 PM

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