FairTax is Fair Taxation
Wikipedia has various links that are necessary reading, especially for those who haven’t read the FairTax books and website info.
For fans of an universal basic income guarantee, it’s in there as the “prebate”. It’s the most supported UBIG proposal to date.
It even has pros for lefties in comparative GINI and taxation concentration coefficients. Tax concentration and GINI coefficients are inversely related.
The OECD measured America’s tax code and the FairTax back in 2012. Here are the results.
A summary for people who TL;DR the above PDF is:
Payroll Tax 0.224 TCC and 0.776 GINIC
Corporate Tax 0.391 TCC and 0.609 GINIC
Individual Income Tax 0.497 TCC and 0.503 GINIC
FairTax 0.617 TCC and 0.383 GINIC
Estate and Gift Tax (Inheritance/Death and Prize/Lottery Winnings Respectively) 0.693 TCC and 0.307 GINIC
The above PDF goes into more detail than the previous links and summaries did.
Tax reform bias is the biggest obstacle to people supporting the FairTax. Everyone knows the status quo tax system is bad, but the status quo survives because of lack of a unified tax reform platform. There are dozens of tax reform plans, but the FairTax has all these above analysis, facts, and figures above supporting it with mathematical proof.
The 1040 (A/EZ/etc) issue is that there is a whole industry based on individual income tax filing which is people have to pay people to make sure they legally fulfill the tax filing mandate under individual income tax law. This would go away under the FairTax proposal. No other tax reform proposal does away with this. I like some tax business offering 1040EZ form filing at free or discounted rates either seasonally or regularly. I personally am willing to forgo the ability to itemize in order to take the simplest tax form. The incentive of itemization is too alluring for others which means they file 1040 or 1040A and pay tax filers lots more money than otherwise. The FairTax does away with this.
The payroll cap is also fixed. The FairTax has no cap, so this is done away with. No other proposal deal with the payroll cap.
International appeal is here for this. The proposal is usually viewed in an America specific way, but Canadians and people around the world have expressed interest in their countries adopting it. Canada is the only country where a political party has explicitly wrote the FairTax into their platform. This is ironic as most of the proposal weight in on America adopting in. While people and politicians support it, it hasn’t attracted much support among political party big wig and other platform makers. Political parties all over the world and across the spectrum support tax reform without specifying any specific proposal. Recent Libertarian Party presidential candidates like Bob Barr and Gary Johnson have supported it during their runs, but the party doesn’t have it as a platform issue.
Books I got from Amazon include The FairTax Book (Neal Boortz & John Linder), FairTax: The Truth: Answering The Critics (Neal Boortz & John Linder), The FairTax Solution: Financial Justice For All Americans (Ken Hoagland), America’s Best Kept Secret: FairTax (Al Ose), FairTax: Can it save the failing U.S. economy? (Christopher McChesney), and The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to The FairTax (Ken Clark). All books are mandatory for expertise on this tax reform proposal.
The FairTax has lots of interesting points to raise as why America and all other countries should adopt this, but I wanted to introduce readers to it first as well as pre-empt criticisms of any tax reforms from proponents of other tax reforms by showing fact, figures, and numbers.
