Friday -- April 15, 2005 TAX DAY
 WISE WORDS FROM A FORMER IRS COMMISSIONER
What better day than Tax Day to bring you some words of
wisdom from a former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service:
"Congress went beyond merely enacting an income tax law and repealed
Article IV of the Bill of Rights, by empowering the tax collector to do
the very things from which that article says we were to be secure. It
opened up our homes, our papers and our effects to the prying eyes of
government agents and set the stage for searches of our books and vaults
and for inquiries into our private affairs whenever the tax men might
decide, even though there might not be any justification beyond mere
cynical suspicion.
The income tax is bad because it has robbed you and
me of the guarantee of privacy and the respect for our property that
were given to us in Article IV of the Bill of Rights. This invasion is
absolute and complete as far as the amount of tax that can be assessed
is concerned. Please remember that under the Sixteenth Amendment,
Congress can take 100% of our income anytime it wants to. As a matter of
fact, right now it is imposing a tax as high as 91%. This is downright
confiscation and cannot be defended on any other grounds. The
income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an
instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the
communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from
each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving
to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs
are the result of indolence or lack of pride, self-respect, personal
dignity or other attributes of men. The income tax is fulfilling the
Marxist prophecy that the surest way to destroy a capitalist society is
by steeply graduated taxes on income and heavy levies upon the estates
of people when they die.
As matters now stand, if our children
make the most of their capabilities and training, they will have to give
most of it to the tax collector and so become slaves of the government.
People cannot pull themselves up by the bootstraps anymore because the
tax collector gets the boots and the straps as well.
The income tax is bad because it is
oppressive to all and discriminates particularly against those people
who prove themselves most adept at keeping the wheels of business
turning and creating maximum employment and a high standard of living
for their fellow men.
I believe that a better way to raise
revenue not only can be found but must be found because I am convinced
that the present system is leading us right back to the very tyranny
from which those, who established this land of freedom, risked their
lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to forever free
themselves..."
T.
Coleman Andrews. Andrews
Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service for three years, from 1953
until 1955. |
Now ... with those words in mind, let's move on ...... TODAY'S THE DAY  Twenty-seven hours. That's the revised figure on just how
long the average person in this country spends filling out their tax return this
year. That's three working days. What do you make a day? Two
hundred bucks? So, if your time is worth about $200 a day that would mean
that you can add $600 to your tax bill ... $600 being just part of your cost of
compliance with the Internal Revenue Code. Add to that any other expenses
you incur for record keeping and tax management during the year ... and it adds
up. What's the total nationwide cost? Try $500 billion, and
that estimate might be low. But that's money. You can't really get a grip
on $500 billion ... so let's try to put it in terms of people. It takes
people to do the bookkeeping, maintain the records, and fill out the forms that
are necessary for tax compliance on both the personal and business level.
How many people? You'll be shocked to learn that tax compliance in the
U.S. takes the combined work effort of about 2,700,000 people working eight-hour
days five days a week just to make sure that individuals and corporations comply
with out tax laws. What a hideous and unforgivable waste of human
potential.
There is a way to spend zero hours a year preparing your federal income taxes. It's called the
FairTax. You would pay taxes only when you spent money and never have a dime withheld from your paycheck. The rate would be 23% and would be reduced to 15.6% after your rebate for necessities.
Just imagine...no IRS, no forms to fill out and no tax day. April 15th would just be like any other Spring day. I've been spending my "spare" time the last few
days doing the final edit on The FairTax book before it heads to the
publisher. I'm lovin' it. As you'll read in a moment, The FairTax
has found some new momentum with a ringing endorsement from a letter to
Washington policymakers from 75 economists. Add these voices to Alan
Greenspan, Milton Friedman and others ..... and we're looking at a something
more than a legislative pipe dream. Speaking of editing ... perhaps this would be a good time
for a tease. Here is a short excerpt from the book, taken from a chapter
on the history of our federal income tax. The class warfare and wealth
envy aspects of the federal income tax are nothing new ... they were there from
the very beginning. Isn't it time for a system of funding our federal
government that isn't based on class envy? [Excerpt
from "The FairTax Saying Goodbye to the IRS and the Federal Income
Tax", soon to be published by Regan Books.] Now
here's where things get really depressing.
After the idea of an income tax was declared to be
unconstitutional the politicians in Washington chose sides and drew their battle lines.
On the one side we had Democrats who were eager to spend the
money that would come from an income tax.
The Democrats included a platform calling for such a
constitutional amendment permitting the income tax in both their 1896
and 1908 platforms. Republicans
were opposed. Those
who favored the income tax scheme met with considerable success in
capturing public sentiment with promises that the tax would "soak the
rich" and would leave the vast majority of Americans alone.
Wealth envy was every bit as alive and well in the early 1900s as
it is in the early 2000s.
The
history timeline now brings us to Texas Senator Joseph Bailey, a
conservative Democrat, who cooked up a scheme to humiliate congressional
Republicans. Bailey
introduced a bill calling for an income tax.
Even though Bailey himself was opposed to an income tax, he
thought that the Republicans would rush in to kill this legislation.
This would further the image that Democrats were trying to
cultivate of Republicans as hostile to the poor and concerned only about
protecting the wealthy. Wouldn't
you know it; things didn't turn out as Bailey had planned.
Liberal Republicans, backed by Teddy Roosevelt, came out in
support of the bill. Passage
seemed all but certain.
Conservative
Republicans needed a way to derail the Bailey Bill and the growing
threat of an income tax. In
one of the worst examples of legislative play-calling in the history of
our Republic, Republicans came up with the brilliant idea of announcing
that they would support the idea of an income tax, but only if that
income tax came about as the result of an amendment to our constitution.
This group of conservative Republicans felt that while there
might be some chance the proposed amendment would actually make it
through the House and the Senate, there was just no way in the world
that the legislatures of three-fourths of the states would vote for
ratification and make it a part of our Constitution. Oops.
Sail
through the House and the Senate the amendment did.
The vote in the Senate was 77-0 and the House approved it by
318-14. It was off to the
states for ratification. Conservative Republicans were certain that the
effort was doomed. They were
wrong.
Democrats
launched a massive effort to convince the people that any income tax
would only be directed at the wealthy, and that ordinary Americans would
be left unscathed. Conservative
legislatures in the West and the South convinced their constituents that
the adoption of the income tax would have little effect on them, since
incomes high enough to be taxed were rare in these areas.
The people, thus anesthetized, raised little objection and the 16th
Amendment was ratified on
February 12, 1913
. This date should be added
to December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001
as dates in American history that shall forever live in infamy. The
FairTax (c) 2005 John Linder & Neal Boortz
|
GOOD NEWS FOR THE FAIRTAX As I said, there is good news for the idea of replacing
our income tax with a consumption tax. A letter signed by more that 75
economists has been delivered to the House, Senate, Treasury tax reform panel
and to President Bush. Copies of the letter have also been sent to
virtually every tax policy maker on Capitol Hill. The letter praises the
FairTax plan. Click
here to read a copy of the letter [pdf] ... complete with the name of every
economist including one Nobel Prize winner, who signed on. The FairTax
plan is viable, my friends, and it can become law. If the people of this
country get behind the plan it can become law. Reforming our tax system is
nothing compared with what a small number of Americans did over 250 years
ago.  Congressman John Linder will join Neal at 10:30am ET to discuss the Fair Tax and take your calls |
I want to address negativism here. I've been talking
up the idea of a national retail sales tax for nearly 20 years on talk
radio. Things are different now. Now people hear my words and
recognize that this might actually become a reality. Most listeners are
thrilled ... but there seems to be a class of listener, or caller if you will,
who feel compelled somehow to come up with a reason why this just won't
work. As soon as the FairTax topic comes up on the show callers get in
line to give me all of the reasons why the plan is going to fail. There's
nothing new in these ideas. They generally focus on the idea that people
will try to get around the tax by operating underground. What's new about
that? The underground economy is alive and well today under the income
tax! This idea isn't perfect! No idea is! But it is certainly
one helluva lot better than what we have going now.
Our society has always had its share of people who are eager to come up with
a reason why something can't be done. Thankfully we've also always had a
good number of people who chose to spend their time trying to figure out how to
make ideas work. These are the innovators whose combined efforts have brought us the incredible standard of living we
enjoy today, and who have made America the destination of choice for people
around the world who want a better life. The FairTax will undoubtedly come up again today on the
show. After all, it's Tax Day. And the nay-sayers will be there ...
ready to tell us why this idea won't fly. That link above will display a
letter that shows you you're wrong. Let's get it done. IDIOCY IN NORTH CAROLINA Some folks in North Carolina are pushing the idea
of offering
in-state tuition for illegal aliens in North Carolina's colleges and
universities. North Carolina is now number two in the rate of increase for
illegal immigration. Make this idiotic idea a law and soon North
Carolina will be vying for number one. Remember, you get more of the behavior
you reward, and less of the behavior your punish. How could you consider
in-state tuition for illegal aliens anything but a reward for illegal behavior? THE BANKRUPTCY BILL
 The House and Senate have passed and the president is expected to sign the
biggest rewrite of our bankruptcy laws in quite some time. To hear the media and many Democrats tell it, the bill is designed to rip off the middle class and screw the poor. The line we hear over and over again is that the bill would make it harder for people to file for bankruptcy. The legislation has been called a windfall for the credit card companies. So what's the truth?
Somewhere between 3 and 20 percent of the people who file for chapter 7 bankruptcy (total liquidation) each year would not be able to do so under this legislation. They would not pass the means test...which is those people who make above the state's median income and can pay $6,000 over five years (a hundred bucks a month) would be moved to Chapter 13 bankruptcy, or a repayment plan. To give you an idea, the median income for a four-person family in the state of Georgia is $62,294 a year. The rest of everybody else would be
unaffected. Just imagine this. If you make above the
median income this horrible bill might actually require you to pay a few bucks a
month to pay back the credit card companies you took money from. You have
the goodies .. the big-screen televisions, the clothes, the jewelry, the cars
.... the bling ... and now you want to stick the credit card company with the
bill. Well aren't you special. The credit card companies are evil
because they want you to abide by the terms of your contract with them, and you
are pure because you want to bail out. Yeah ... makes sense to me.
There are about 1.6 million bankruptcies in this country a year. That's more bankruptcies per capita than during the Great Depression. Perhaps if people would save a little money instead of leveraging themselves up to their eyeballs just to amass as many toys as possible, there wouldn't be so many bankruptcies. But don't worry: the legislation doesn't take effect until 180 days after George Bush signs it.
Let the stampede to the courthouse begin.
IRS TO OUTSOURCE COLLECTIONS
The arm of the Imperial Federal Government responsible for tax collections, that would be the IRS, has gotten the OK to
farm out uncollected tax payments to private contractors. The IRS estimates $270 billion goes uncollected every year, and they want that money. So now private companies are lining up at the trough to start collecting it, and naturally, keep a cut for themselves.
There is opposition from both political parties, for a variety of reasons. One is privacy,
if you owe the IRS money, your private information will be turned over to another company to collect. As you can tell by the headlines, not all companies are too good at keeping your personal information under wraps. Of course, the IRS uses your Social Security number to identify you, which is about as personal as you get.
Then there's the collector's percentage, estimated to be 25%. Some argue that the government would get 100% if they were doing the collecting, but they're not doing so hot these days. The private collectors are expected to be more aggressive. Then of course you have the Democratic opposition. Private collectors mean less federal jobs which means less guaranteed votes in the next election cycle. The government employee unions are none too happy either.
Legislation has been introduced to repeal the practice, but don't hold your
breath. One course of action is not to owe the IRS any back taxes.
Or, you call your representative and ask them to support the FairTax bill.
Otherwise, you might get a call some Sunday morning from Mr. Patel in India wondering when he can expect payment.
READING ASSIGNMENTS
The Democrats have really stepped in it this time....their accusations against Tom DeLay employing family members has opened the floodgates. Looks like
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has quite the family working for him.
Is the bankruptcy a needed reform or a windfall to the lending industry? Tim Kane looks at the problem, whose responsible and what the legislation really does.
A recent survey shows that 13% of Americans cheat on their taxes. Does this mean people are dishonest because of it? Mona Charen investigates.
Tom DeLay is getting slammed in the media and by the left...for what? David Limbaugh looks at the facts of the accusations, and separates fact from fiction.
It's that time of year....time for high school kids to apply to attend college. But
what exactly is involved in the
college admissions process? Thomas Sowell says it's nothing more than voodoo....unscientific and unreliable.
Here's a dirty little secret of affirmative action: some minorities are discriminated against at the expense of other
minorities. Jonah Goldberg looks at the issue of Asian admissions.
There's lots of headlines these days about the trade deficit. But what's the solution to the trade imbalance? Larry Kudlow tells us what isn't...protectionism.
The AARP is fully against private Social Security accounts....but John Carlisle says not only are they opposed, but
the AARP is playing dishonest games with the truth. Why then, do so many people join? Must be the discounts.
People who commit murder and rape don't need to be
understood, they need to be locked up and have the key thrown away. Stanley Crouch has an interesting piece about a tragic crime that happened on a Bronx subway platform.
Unbelievably, Kofi Annan is blaming the Oil-For-Food scandal on America and Great
Britain, but not himself. Has the man no shame? Apparently not. The National Football League is working hard to prevent
people from getting their hands on "Mexico" NFL jerseys.
There's a reason for this. Is the Mexican military actually escorting
people to the U.S. border so that they can make their crossing ... including
drug-runners? Website lists library as a
gay cruising spot. Esquire's sex survey shows American women
take longer to get in bed than women in some other parts of the world. Nealz Nuze is famous! Hat tip to
thepoliticalteen.net for grabbing
this video
[4.7mb wmv] from MSNBC that features boortz.com! |
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