Posted on 04/17/2015 8:19:45 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
If you’ve recently finished running the gantlet known as income tax preparation, you might be particularly cheered by Sen. Ted Cruz’s suggestion to abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
After all, few of us — except perhaps a few tax preparers for whom the practice provides a livelihood — enjoy navigating the increasingly arcane bureaucracy that governs our tax code. Every year, it seems, there are new rules, new deductions, new forms to fill out and new uncertainty about how all of it will affect one’s bank account.
So when Cruz and fellow presidential campaigner Sen. Rand Paul began talking about scrapping the IRS and replacing it with a flat tax system, we can understand why it got some attention.
The idea of a flat tax is nothing new. Presidential candidates as diverse as Jerry Brown, Steve Forbes and Herman Cain (remember him?) have proposed establishing a single tax rate for all Americans to simplify the tax code.
The idea’s principal appeal is in its simplicity. Proponents have also argued that it would boost the economy by freeing businesses (and individuals, to a lesser extent) of the costly requirements of tax preparation, and that it would cut billions from the federal budget to effectively do away with the IRS.
“It’s so simple, really,” wrote Steve Tobak for Fox Business in 2013. “Just implement a flat tax system, do away with the whole 70,000-page tax code and, voila, no more IRS. Life is good.”
But with respect to Mr. Tobak, we would argue that it is anything but simple.
First of all, it is foolish to suggest that there would be “no more IRS” — or some equivalent bureaucracy — even under a flat tax code....
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailystar.com ...
If there is only ine reason for Cruz to win, it is to see the ‘Save the IRS’ marches.
You can smell the fear.
Translation they don’t like Cruz and they know how popular this issue will be?
No one. It's all just BS - total, unmitigated BS.
I just saw a tax return done by a professional tax preparer, and it was wrong.
But I'll bet it flies with the IRS incompetents.
It took them six months after they got my pictures, with the lines and the circles and the highlighting, to figure out that I was right.
And that they were wrong.
I had to tell off one of their phone babysitters who tried to tell me I was wrong. I finally played trump, and asked him if he was an "IRS tax analyst".
That shut his lying @ss up. :)
Yes you can.
That and 79,000 pages of gobbledegook
Obama added over 7,000 pages this year , himself , when last year it was over 73,000 pages in 2014.
There are so many examples of conservatives serving in the role of useful idiots to Republican candidates.
How many election cycles have we heard candidates tout the flat tax, or dumping the IRS? It is always red meat for conservative voters. Then, crickets.
Same election time static occurs on the subject of abortion. Then, crickets.
There is just always another election around the corner every two years that makes it convenient to ditch all that campaign bait. I don’t fault Cruz on ridding us of the IRS, or Paul for turning the abortion debate around on democrats. Presidents can’t do these things without a willing majority on the Hill.
It's getting attention because the American people just saw the IRS used as a political weapon against followers of a political party and nothing done in response by the law enforcement branches of the FedGov or any other arm of the LEO's.
There but for the Grace of God go I.
Abolition of the IRS is going to get to be a stronger force as elections go on.
More specifically, the Supreme Court has historically clarified that Congress is prohibited from laying taxes in the name of state power issues, essentially any issue which Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Bearing Congress’s limited power to lay taxes in mind, consider that the Founding States had not only established the federal Senate, but had given the power to vote for federal senators uniquely to state lawmakers. The idea was that federal senators were expected to defend their states by killing bills which not only steal state powers, but also steal state revenues associated with those powers.
But the constitutional firewall that the Senate was supposed to to provide for the states got destroyed when state lawmaker cave into pressure from misguided, low-information citizens and ratified 17A. The problem is that low-information citizens go home after electing their favorite senators and watch football, oblivious to the idea that their corrupt senators are working in cahoots with the corrupt House to make bills which steal state powers and state revenues associated with those powers as the Founders had feared.
In fact, note that the Senate should have killed the bill that established the IRS imo. This is because the Founding States had made the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, evidently a good place to hide them from Congress, to clarify that all federal powers are vested in the elected members of Congress, not in the executive or judicial branches, or in non-elected government bureaucrats like those running the IRS.
So Congress has a constitutional monopoly on federal legislative powers whether it wants it or not. But by delegating federal legislative powers to non-elected IRS bureaucrats to make federal policy, Congress is wrongly protecting federal legislative powers from the wrath of the voters in blatant defiance of the constitutional statutes referenced above imo.
Getting back to 17A, that amendment needs to disappear. In fact, the repeal amendment ought to include the Court’s clarification of Congress’s limited power to lay taxes as a provision.
What you say is only partly true.
You have to get elected first. Most of the ‘flat tax’ candidates don’t get elected. As a matter of fact, none of them have been elected.
Once elected they must be willing to use the power of the executive fully to get their way. This is one thing we as Conservatives can learn from Obama. He’s unafraid to install his edicts by hook or by crook.
A President can do virtually anything. They simply have to remember that their vote is worth 357 votes of the Legislature. That is the amount of votes needed to over turn a VETO. 290 in the House and 67 in the Senate.
If a POTUS is willing to exert his authority there is little he couldn’t do rather quickly. It only takes the will and the guts to use the power.
Much as I despise the IRS, I have never quite understood the call to “abolish” the IRS. Taxes will always exist (much as we like to daydream otherwise).
Who will collect and enforce? The FBI? …...Really?
Maybe it's time for at least the flat tax Steve Forbes proposed in 1996--a tax that will have 1/4 the compliance and economic opportunity cost of the current system. Because of its simplicity, it removes a gigantic hurdle against economic upward mobility, and that means we'll experience a higher economic growth rate.
there are several critical issues Cruz, or almost anyone else, could win on...
this is one of them. and Cruz sounds like he will do it, too
one of the best things for USA (liberty, and the economy ...both)
will be getting this done.
According to Joseph Rosenberg, a senior research associate of the Tax Policy Center, a flat tax at least in the low- to mid-20% range, would be necessary to raise as much revenue as the current system. Has anyone seen anything justifying lower rates?
Getting rid of the IRS would be sufficient reason to vote for Cruz. Getting rid of income tax all together and replacing it with a sales tax would be 10 times better.
Nothing has given the federal government more power over our lives than the 16th amendment.
When I want facts, I go right to the Oneonta Daily Star......yep
Wouldn’t that be fun?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.