Steven,
I'm not sure I am following your logic here--while I agree that there are far too many people not contributing to the system, the Fair Tax bypasses the need to tax income but instead shifts the burden to consumption.
Here is a quick statement I found that does a pretty good job describing our current system contrasted with life under the FairTax:
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Congressman Jim Bridenstine (OK-1)--The FairTax is the fair solution to many issues. Think about the tax question this way: Suppose you were designing a system to fund the operation of the government. You are given two proposals.
The first plan would set taxes on income. The taxes would be graduated by level of income with thousands of loopholes designed to reward all manner of behavior or misbehavior. The tax code would be so complex that it would be over 73,600 pages of tax code, rules, and rulings, changing every year. (That count was before Obamacare was thrown into the mix.) You would make citizens spend 6.1 billion hours each year struggling to decipher the tax code to avoid penalties and audits. You would also impose a national cost of $170 billion per year just to comply with tax rules.
Then you would take a whole army of bright young people, who could have been doing something productive like discovering a cure for cancer, and make them tax accountants and IRS agents. IRS employment is approaching 100,000, and that doesn’t count tax accountants employed by individuals and businesses all over the country. The time, expense, and human resources devoted to complying with the tax code would all reduce the productive capacity of the economy.
The price of everything would have to be raised at every level of production to cover the cost of income taxes: The farm supply store employees, the farmer, the grain silo operator, the miller, the baker, the bread wrapper manufacturer, the grocer, and the transportation workers at every step in the process would all have their income and payroll taxes covered by the higher price of bread. Each of these employees along the production chain would see a big chunk of every paycheck taken for income taxes.
The second plan would allow everyone to keep their entire paycheck or retirement check. A single tax rate would apply to everything everyone buys. Poor people who are living below the level of poverty would receive a monthly rebate so their effective tax rate could be as low as zero. Prices throughout the economy would be based on the actual costs of production. There would be no income tax, no one would file income tax returns, and there would be no IRS.
Which system would you chose? I think the choice is pretty obvious. And the choice is real. We have the opportunity to reverse 100 years of compounded complexity in the IRS code by enacting a FairTax system in the United States. We have the opportunity to eliminate the IRS. The IRS has become a poster child for the problems and abuses endemic when government gets too big.
It is time to simplify. It is time to quit wasting our national resources of time and money and people on complying with a behemoth tax code. It is time to end the abusive excesses of big government.
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