Implications to Churches, Charities & Overall Morality

see www.FairTaxWarrior.com for further info

For some reason many Americans seem unable to grasp the enormous economic benefits to be derived from shifting ALL Federal funding from an Income Tax system to a consumption tax like The FairTax. There is absolutely no case for keeping the current (or any) Income Tax system, but most Americans refuse to even discuss the possibility that their government has misled them on taxation for so long (approximately 90 years now).

So, this paper will attempt to point out non-economic reasons for replacing all Federal funding with The FairTax.

• Increase in disposable income for every American (due to NO Federal withholding) means increased charitable giving.
1. Every study shows that charitable giving in this country is directly related to the amount of wealth of it’s citizens. The FairTax increases the wealth of EVERY American except criminals. And criminals are not big donors to charity in the first place.
2. Income-Tax proponents will have you believe that giving is directly related to income tax rates, because of tax deductions. That is an utter falsehood. Relatively few Americans even file itemized deductions and besides, most charitable giving is obviously done because of a sense of helpfulness and not as some kind of financial calculation.
• Removal of the ‘tax-exempt’ and ‘tax-deductable’ statuses means decreased control by Government.
1. Currently the Government grants tax-exempt status to organizations who fall within guidelines the Government establishes. If an organization wants to retain that coveted tax-exempt status then they need to toe the Government line.
2. Similar situation with money given to a tax-exempt organization. The giver is ‘rewarded’ by being able to deduct a portion of that money from his year-end Federal tax bill.
3. Tax-Exemption is thus a tool the Government uses to encourage organizations to operate as the Government deems acceptable. Is that really freedom? I know the U.S. Constitution never gave that power to the any branch of Government. I doubt the Bible says a government should have such control? Same for the Torah and the Koran.
• Removal of ALL Federal withholding means all non-government education is un-taxed.
1. Currently, most Americans are forced to share the cost of public schools through local taxation. The Federal Government has for decades now more or less mandated how public schools operate. They do this mainly through Federal funding monies (‘comply or we hold back money’) and a Department of Education (‘comply or else’) that was also clearly never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Thus, many of us interchange public schools with the term government schools.
2. To send our children to non-government schools costs money in the form of tuition (usually quite expensive). The Government does not even allow such tuition to be tax-deductible, meaning that not only do parents have to pay that tuition PLUS public school funding but they also have to pay that tuition out of money they have to pay full Federal Income Taxes on.
3. Under The FairTax, ALL Federal revenues come from the sale of retail goods and services. ALL investment expenses (including investment in our children) are not taxed at all. Thus, parents still have to pay private tuition in addition to funding public school BUT the private tuition is NEVER taxed by the Federal Government.
• Removal of the ‘reported-income’ loophole means criminal activity is NO LONGER granted tax-exempt status by our Government.
1. Under ours (or ANY) Income Tax, all that can be taxed is reported income. Drug-dealers, pornographers, etc NEVER report their income and thus NEVER pay any Federal taxes on it. Of course there are laws saying Americans must report their income but if you don’t get a paycheck or run a business how in the heck is that law supposed to be enforced?
2. Every American taxpayer has their tax bill inflated by approximately 30% (this is the IRS estimate) because they must make up for the taxes that these criminals do not pay.
3. This means we financially SUBSIDIZE the very immoral activity that most of us do not want to even exist. This is INSANITY! But that is also an Income Tax.
• No Federal taxation at all for ANY legal American to buy bare necessities for their family means the end to the ‘serfdom tax’.
1. Under current Income Tax system, working Americans who live at the poverty level pay various taxes out of their meager salaries. This situation is analogous to the serfdom taxes of the Middle Ages where dirt-poor serfs were taxed in part to insure they would never climb out of poverty.
2. Under The FairTax EVERY American is supplied with a monthly stipend to cover the consumption tax on purchases needed to support them up to the Federal poverty level. Thus, all Federal taxes up to poverty level are 100% paid for already.
3. Thus, The FairTax encourages poor Americans to climb out of poverty rather than takes a portion of their money from them before they even get to see it.
• The FairTax follows the saying to ‘Render onto Cesar what is Cesar’s’, unlike the Income Tax system.
1. The Income Tax system effectively follows the saying ‘Render onto Cesar what is Cesar’s AND whatever criminals choose not to render to Cesar’.
2. I doubt that saying is part of any religious tradition.

Spending-Cut Talk is Cheap

One of the things that infuriates me most is so-called Conservatives whose whole fiscal policy consists of the words 'I favor Spending Cuts'.

Few have any details except that there is STUFF they think oughta be CUT. Don't bother them with boring details like what they would cut and by how much. Ssssh. 'That does not win votes' whispers Mr. Conservative.

Well, there is bunches that need to be cut. Let's try EVERYTHING that supports STUFF not mentioned in The Constitution. And while Mr. Repu ... uh ... I mean Mr. Conservative often feels the same way he of course feels that winning votes is more important than some little thing like the good of the country.

But wait .... is tax-cutting even a wise thing to do? Of course it is, but following tax-related money from a U.S. taxpayer to the IRS suggests that it only makes sense after another major step.

Taking 2004 as an example, the U.S. Treasury pulled in approx $2 TRILLION in tax revenue. Taxpayers, however, were forced to pay approx $2.5 TRILLION out of their pockets.
Where is the $500 BILLION difference? Well, the U.S. Government mandates that it's citizens (individually or via corporations) follow a complicated procedure of administrative collecting & reporting known as the U.S. Income Tax Code. The cost to us of complying with this mandate IS that $500 BILLION.

Are there so few of us who understand what the words WASTE, INEFFICIENCY and EXTORTION means? If I owe you $100 (whether I think it should really be that much or not) but you tell me I MUST pay your friend Myron $120 and he will in turn pay off your $1o0 debt, why in hell should I accept that as an acceptable idea.

Yet that is exactly what our government does every year and apparently 95% of this country thinks nothing of it .... but they sure as heck want spending to be CUT. Oh yeah!
Are we all brain-dead? I know schools rarily teach economics but this is a very simple concept. The 60% or so of us Americans who actually pay our taxes shell out $1.20 to the tax 'system' to provide our government with $1.00 in actual taxes. Why would we do something that STUPID? Because it is the LAW!

Mr. Conservative, if forced, can tell you about at most maybe $50 BILLION in spending cuts he wants to make. I'm sure it makes him feel all macho and stuff, but why on Earth would that be done before stopping the total waste of that $500 BILLION each year.

Every Repub ... eh ... Conservative will proudly point to President Bush's roughly $100 BILLION per year tax cuts and tell you how much it helped this country. Yeah, they'll say, Congress spent $450 BILLION more than it took in but WE cut those taxes some.

$500 BILLION people!!! Come on, I know it's a big number but figure it out. That is 5 times your celebrated tax cuts and approx the same as the entire Federal budget deficit.

Replace this damn Income Tax insanity. Be an American first, then you can crow all you want about being Mr. RepubliConservative.

Taxation Without Truth

Current taxation by the U.S. Government is a travesty. Its purpose is to keep citizens in the dark about obscene fiscal policies yet fleece those citizens to the maximum extent without their knowledge.

And its successful. The vast majority of Americans have no real idea of how much taxes they pay and they blindly keep electing politicians who perpetuate the shell game we call ‘the U.S. Tax Code’.

The first step to any real reform must be to get the truth out so American taxpayers get angry; and they should be VERY angry.

There are currently 3 main vehicles for federal taxation. One is actually called Federal Income Tax. That’s the tax vehicle whereby LAW-ABIDING wage-earners (not nearly everyone) have 20%, 30% or more of their paychecks confiscated and then are allowed to spend time and money to try and get a small portion of that confiscated money returned back to them on April 15^th. This form of taxation is proclaimed as being ‘progressive’ since it burdens lower-income Americans less than higher-income ones.

The second form of tax is called FICA, where LAW-ABIDING wage-earners (again not nearly everyone) have 15% of their paychecks confiscated in the name of 2 other BROKE shell games called Social Security and Medicaire. This form of taxation is definitely ‘regressive’ in that all below-$90,000 wage-earners pay exactly the same rate while higher-level wage-earners pay effectively a LOWER RATE.

The third form of tax is the most hidden (and regressive) of all. It is corporate income taxes. This tax is a cost of doing business just as is labor or material costs, so it is simply built into the price of American goods and services. Probably the biggest tax lie is that corporations somehow pay taxes. All they can do is collect taxes from consumers in the form of higher prices for their goods and services. These taxes (in the form of higher prices) are paid by not only the final consumer but by every manufacturer in every step of production along the whole production life-cycle. And prices are higher not only because of this insidious corporate income tax but also because of the huge compliance costs these corporations have to pay (lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, etc). It is estimated that 15-25% of the cost of EVERY good or service in the U.S. is attributable to the corporate income tax ‘scheme’.

Mad yet? Thought you knew from those infamous Federal Income Tax tables what your tax rate was? That published rate isn’t even close! In most cases, not even half-way. Thought that all Americans paid personal income taxes? Nearly half don’t (mostly those that don’t rely on a conventional paycheck), leaving the other half to pick up their slack.

What’s the remedy? Well, how about telling the TRUTH about the rate of taxation. And how about SLASHING the REAL effective tax rate approximately in half from what it is now. And how about forcing all Americans to ACTUALLY pay their share of that tax.

There is legislation before the Congress to do just that! In the House of Representatives it’s called HR25. In the Senate it’s called S25. In plain English it’s called the Fair Tax.

Basically, the Fair Tax will consist of

· A single sales tax paid for each RETAIL purchase

· A single payment each month to every American to offset ALL sales taxes on essential spending

I will leave the specifics of The FairTax for you to discover, which I truly hope you will do. But the specifics all revolve around those 2 simple basics.

When our Founding Fathers formed this Republic, they never in their wildest dreams conceived of a populace having their income taxed. Taxation without representation was a call to arms that formed the United States. And taxation then was an import tax on luxury items, which the wealthy in effect chose to pay by their lifestyles.

Somewhere in the early 20^th century the Founder’s dreams went wildly wrong. In a nation founded upon a Constitution, an evil called ‘implied powers’ was naively adopted as a means of circumventing the document that was meant to be the blueprint for humanity’s grand experiment. What has resulted is a bloated, inefficient government where the vast majority of its functions have ABSOLUTELY no Constitutional basis.

And what feeds ‘implied powers’ and this runaway cycle of unwarranted federal expansion: MONEY. It’s citizens’ money, in the form of taxes. So in 1913 an evil con job gets fostered on the Constitution to give the United States government a license to confiscate money from its citizens in almost unlimited fashion. That con was called the 16^th Amendment. And since then the money flow (and resulting growth thru ‘implied powers’) has never abated.

By the way, another fact about The FairTax is that it starts the Constitutional process for repeal of that 16^th Amendment.

As I have already pointed out, United States federal taxation is all based on lies and convoluted rules that can’t easily be comprehended. After all, no amount of ‘implied powers’ would be tolerated if Americans really knew that the 25% Federal tax rate they occasionally complain about was effectively more like 50%.

And even that obnoxious rate isn’t high enough for the Washington politicians of the past 50 years. We can’t even pay for the United States government to function each year, much less pay for the approximately $200 BILLION (and growing) interest payments on the accumulated national debt our esteemed leaders have piled up.

Taxation without representation really wasn’t all that bad when the alternative is TAXATION BY LIE (with representation, though)!

Few Washington politicians will ever expose the shell game, though. They can’t! A revolt would surely ensue. And if you think it makes a bit of difference whether those politicians are Democrat or Republican then you are just part of the problem. They all spend your money with reckless abandon. Their primary responsibility IS NOT to the United States but IS to promise increased spending to get re-elected.

That makes change entirely up to the American people. This is incidentally where the framers of the Constitution meant Governmental change to emanate from.

It’s called GRASS ROOTS. And don’t tell me it can’t work. I refuse to believe the United States of America is so far gone that we the people can’t effect our own government. I refuse to believe we can’t reclaim our Constitution.

Educate yourself on the Fair Tax. Visit www.FairTaxWarrior.com or www.fairatx.org and check out the facts. Read our arguments. Locate and attend local volunteer meetings. Get involved. Call your Representative and Senators.

We need all the help we can get. This country deserves to be put back on track.

Let's Get Started

If this looks to be working right my intent is to bloviate here every week or so.