didn’t our current tax code start as a flat tax?
teeman
Yes, it started that way and it always grows to a complex pile of indecipherable statutes via a midnight amendment process.
In other words a Flat Tax never stays flat for long because the Flat Tax needs the 16th Amendment to be legal and the 16th allows Congress to amend the tax code at will.
The USA has had 5 major tax reforms since 1913 and each reform has made the tax code ‘flatter’ and ‘simpler’. And it always grows back into a monster because Congress has the license (16th Amendment) to do what ever they want with taxes.
Since the last tax reform in 1986 under Ronald Reagan, there have been more than 20,000 amendments to the tax code and a quadrupling of the number of tax lobbyists in DC.
The revolving doors between Congress and the IRS, between IRS and tax lobbying firms, and between Congress and tax lobbying firms are used by persons that form the Praetorian Guard of the Washington establishment.
The battle over freedom comes down to about 50,000 of these contemporary Praetorian Guards plus their surrogates in the NY media against 144 million individual tax filers. If we get a critical mass of these 144 million to understand the FairTax and stand their ground against the naysayers, then we win hands down.
But the DC Praetorians will use their allies and surrogates in the NY media complex to paint us as radicals and bigots of the Tea Party variety. They will smear us so often that anyone watching who is not educated to the FairTax and who is not aware of what the NY media does to brainwash them, these watchers will have a prejudice against us.
But it only takes on average about 3000 FairTax activists in each Congressional district to turn the Congress member to the FairTax. So we need to keep adding to our ranks.
The good news is that once a person gets it, gets the FairTax, it does not leave them and they can’t think of anything else. But they can get frustrated with the pace of progress. I always tell them the Income Tax took 52 years to become legal and the FairTax has only been out there a little more than 10 years, and it won’t take near as long to get the FairTax passed.