How to reverse the destruction of American jobs: Replace (all) taxes, with one 100% import tariff.

Defend Liberty wrote:

No tax system is designed to specifically address spending. However The Fair Tax does address the spending problem by eliminating the IRS and its $11 billion/year price tag. The Fair Tax dovetails with the limited government principles in the Tea party for the above reason.

So, the FairTax might save enough to take the deficit from $1,470,000,000,000 to $1,459,000,000,000 before you add what the states will charge the feds for administrative and collection fees. Or will this be an unfunded mandate on the states?

The FairTax folks have grossly underestimated the administrative and enforcement costs of the FairTax. They base their estimates on current sales taxes in many states. However, no state has a tax base as wide as the FairTax, nor is there a state with a sales tax rate anywhere close to as high as the proposed tax rates in the FairTax. Thousands of businesses (mainly service businesses) which do not currently collect sales tax would be added to the sales tax rolls. And the states generally have no experience with trying to collect taxes from these currently untaxed businesses. Adding them to the sales tax rolls will cost money. Where will it come from?

The real problem right now is that for every $1 we pay in tax revenues, the Congress borrows an additional $0.40 so that they can spend a total of $1.40 for every tax dollar we pay.

A "revenue neutral" tax system replacement doesn't do anything to resolve the actual problems we are facing now.

Finally, I think most TEA Partiers are in favor of scrapping our current system. The "Contract from America" last year included fundamental tax reform. Here's their point on that:

From the Contract from America
Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 word—the length of the original Constitution.

I would definitely support that.

However, H.R.25 (The FairTax bill) is very heavy for that goal, coming in around 5 times the length of the constitution (well over 22,000 words).

Oh, and in your reply to Pollster1, you left something out. You should have included this:

The same will happen with ~~another flat income tax~~ FairTax only faster thanks to the thousands of lobbyists that didn't exist in 1913.

“Gotta start somewhere!.. Might as well be there.” Terrible answer. How about we Abolish trade with communists altogether, exports too, not just tarrifs. A better place to start would be securing borders or putting the EPA in check. Your tarrif would mean less product on shelves not a solved problem. There are many countries on par with our standards, Canada for starters. One idea sprang from what you said though, pass a law stating by the year 2020 we shall import no energy and remove the restrictions preventing us from being energy independent. That in itself would spark a boom like none we’ve seen in my lifetime and best of all it won’t just be a bubble.

So, let’s say that this works for a few months, until imports stop and people can’t afford to pay twice for imported goods and will be severely limited to what they can only buy here. Then, after there is less competition, and all that Union and high cost labor jacks the price up on most everything, not to mention the already high cost to produce anything in this country, we not only have record unemployment, we have record inflation and shortages of most everything. What’s your solution to that?

And you are dead wrong about how we became the greatest nation on Earth. It did not happen through a 100% import tariff. It happened because at the time, we grew and produced a surplus of goods that we sold around the World, that the rest of the World demanded. Thank God that those other countries did not do back then, what you advocate today. If they had, we would still be a colony under some other export empire.

This has got to be the stupidest idea I’ve ever seen seriously suggested on FR. What better way to send our economy back to the level of the old USSR...except even they had trade partners. If we did this, we wouldn’t have any...except for the natural resources we’d be forced to buy (at double the price, gee what a great idea). So, we’d have manufacturing jobs, but not ad many as we have now because no one would buy our stuff and we’d be a captive market forced to overpay for now crappy goods due to loss of competition...yeah, sounds exactly like the old Soviet Union....

Any single item in the federal budget is a very small percentage compared to the overall budget. However the IRS is the single biggest and most costly agency in the federal government. The far greater cost is the sacrifice of Constitutional freedoms with a system that presume people guilty until proven innocent and has the power to delve into every personal aspect of one a person's life. All that goes away with The Fair Tax. How do you know what the cost of The Fair Tax will be? Where is you data? Are you actually claiming the 136 page Fair Tax will not cost less than the than the 67,500 plus page, $11 billion federal income tax code? Your comparing state income tax bases and state tax rates to the Fair Tax is irrelevant since the Fair Tax is a federal, not a state tax!

The Fair Tax rate will not collect anymore than is currently collected under the federal income tax code. Forty five states already collect a state sales tax. The Fair Tax will be merely one more line on the forms used to collect state sales taxes. Moreover businesses will be paid for remitting the tax. As IA stated in my earlier post, no tax code is designed to specifically addresses spending but the Fair will reduce spending by replacing the IRS with a much smaller bureaucracy. You need to read the Contract from America website more closely. At the top and bottom of the home page Fair Tax is listed as one of the founding partners. Maybe you should write or email the Contract from America folks telling them not to associate themselves with The Fair Tax because the wording is too long even though hit is far less than the number of words in the more than 67,500 pages in the federal income tax code.

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