Submitted by Ian Repley, Ann Arbor, Jan 9, 2008 04:52

The FairTax Act of 2007 (HR 25 / S 1025) represents a prospective power shift of massive proportions in America. It lays out a practical ideal of voluntary tax payment, based on a substantial level of taxpayer choice that the plan affords. Since FairTax untaxes basic necessities (up to socially-accepted levels of poverty-level spending), what is taxed is marginal, and/or desired or preferred, on a broader base of retail products and services. This is to say that the taxpayer may, under the FairTax, choose to purchase used products and avoid paying the tax. And, to the extent desired, the taxpayer may choose to self-perform certain services rather than pay for them. This will stimulate do-it-yourself education, improve citizens' self-reliance; indeed the FairTax represents the possibility of ushering in a new can-do citizen psychology that would accrue to greater demands for government accountability - truly, a cultural sea change.

Government is the necessary glue that enables the social fabric to cohere. It does this by effecting rules that ostensibly provide members with equitable access to wealth and resources. It also must provide ostensibly equitable enforcement of those rules in order to mitigate threats to the social fabric. It is unrealistic to believe that the structures of a national government can be supported on donations, thus the need for taxes. Naysayers love to characterize anything purporting to be a fair tax as an oxymoron - but it is not true. The idea of fairness has to do with equitable sharing in the cost by all members who depend upon the social fabric for food, shelter, clothing and post-necessity economic enterprise. And, because of the shift of power from politicians and special interests under an enacted FairTax, the elected will find it more difficult to both enlarge government, and implement any dual system of taxation. FairTax strategist, Dennis Calabrese, discusses how the FairTax repeals the income tax, how it does away with the IRS, and how it addresses other aspects of frequent concern to skeptics.

The FairTax has a much greater opportunity for success to operate as a self-regulating mechanism because of increased visibility of the actual federal tax load citizens carry. One finds that the current system, ostensibly regulated by the Internal Revenue Code, is in fact poorly regulated because of continually increasing complexity (the effect of "tax favors" from politicians, through lobbyists, to favored corporations and other special interests) stemming from the desire by those holding government position to steer public behavior using tax code "carrots." We have seen how 100 years of this type of behavior has eroded the Nation's currency and the purchasing power of working family incomes. "Visionist," Tom Frey believes the current tax system will soon simply collapse; and economist Laurence Kotlikoff heralds that - short of enactment of FairTax (or an otherwise unlikely change in Congressional spending habits) - the U.S. will shortly be facing an irrevocable economic breakdown. (Kotlikoff believes that passage of the FairTax can stave off the economic ruin we're facing, though he would be surprised to see it happen absent a significant grassroots uprising.)

Frey and Kotlikoff may be right on both counts, and we may not be able to successfully evoke change . . . but shall we not try?

At least one front-running presidential candidate believes we should.

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