Buchanan, back Fair Tax Act

Dear Congressman Vern Buchanan: Your proposed tax plan fails the “big, bold” concept espoused by House Speaker Paul Ryan. Your bill is neither big nor bold. It is simply more of the same, tinkering around the edges of a deeply flawed tax system that can never be “fair.”

A truly big and bold plan would be to rip the tax code out by its 1913 roots. It would defund and permanently close an intrusive Internal Revenue Service that is inefficient at best, and is alternately feared and hated by most Americans.

Just such a proposal has been languishing in your House Ways and Means Committee more than a decade. It was born out of more than $20 million in privately funded research and has been endorsed by more than 80 leading economists from academia and the private sector, including one Nobel laureate. Most of that research money went into making the proposal progressive, rather than regressive, so as to protect the poor.

That proposal is known as the Fair Tax Act. It eliminates all federal taxes on productivity and income of any kind, and shifts the tax burden to consumption. As you are aware, too, consumption has followed a near consistent and upward growth curve since World War II.

“Big and bold” is to take a leaf from the Democrats’ passage of the Affordable Care Act, when not one Republican voted in favor. Fair Tax Act supporters have blamed Democrats for preventing the FAIRtax from passing out of House Ways and Means for a full House vote. Now, with the Republican majorities in both branches and a Republican president, you won’t need a single Democrat vote to enact the Fair Tax Act.

As I see it, you stand either with the American people or with Democrats and their Washington elites. The elites want more of the same; America’s working people do not.

This story was originally published November 19, 2016 at 3:13 PM with the headline "Buchanan, back Fair Tax Act."