Republicans Plan Push For Elimination Of Irs

[Robert Goodman]

***the UPI version is lower down on this page***

from drudge, so we'll have to see how accurate it is. i've said this was the way to do taxes for years. it would make everyone pay tax, but it's tax as you buy, so it's basically "pay as you go tax". the real question is would big business get "exemptions" (ie; tax breaks)?


REPUBLICANS PLAN PUSH FOR ELIMINATION OF IRS

A domestic centerpiece of the Bush/GOP agenda for a second Bush term is getting rid of the Internal Revenue Service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The Speaker of the House will push for replacing the nation's current tax system with a national sales tax or a value added tax, Hill sources tell DRUDGE.

"People ask me if I’m really calling for the elimination of the IRS, and I say I think that’s a great thing to do for future generations of Americans," Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert explains in his new book, to be released on Wednesday.

"Pushing reform legislation will be difficult. Change of any sort seldom comes easy. But these changes are critical to our economic vitality and our economic security abroad," Hastert declares in SPEAKER: LESSONS FROM FORTY YEARS IN COACHING AND POLITICS.

"“If you own property, stock, or, say, one hundred acres of farmland and tax time is approaching, you don’t want to make a mistake, so you’re almost obliged to go to a certified public accountant, tax preparer, or tax attorney to help you file a correct return. That costs a lot of money. Now multiply the amount you have to pay by the total number of people who are in the same boat. You can’t. No one can because precise numbers don’t exist. But we can stipulate that we’re talking about a huge amount. Now consider that a flat tax, national sales tax, or VAT would not only eliminate the need to do this, it could also eliminate the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) itself and make the process of paying taxes much easier."

"By adopting a VAT, sales tax, or some other alternative, we could begin to change productivity. If you can do that, you can change gross national product and start growing the economy. You could double the economy over the next fifteen years. All of a sudden, the problem of what future generations owe in Social Security and Medicare won’t be so daunting anymore. The answer is to grow the economy, and the key to doing that is making sure we have a tax system that attracts capital and builds incentives to keep it here instead of forcing it out to other nations."

[AvatarOfVishnu]

let me start off by saying that i'm definately NOT a republican - i'm gonna vote 4 John Kerry because Bush is a dangerous man in a dangerous time.....now 2 the topic at hand

i agree w/ Hastert (never thought i'd type those words)

we will always need a govt agency 2 collect taxes, so the IRS wont go away, but it would B transformed.....basically, w/ Hasterts plan, individuals no longer need 2 concern themselves w/ taxes, they R built into the purchase price & businesses take care of paying Uncle Sam

but if we move our tax system in this direction, we will need MANY safeguards.....1st of all, food should not B taxed but instead subsidized so that poor people or those out of work can survive.....clothing, public transportation, health care, rent - all should B tax-free &/or subsidized (at least to a certain level) 2 ensure that people can have a minimum level safety-net

i'm sure there R many other precautions that would need 2 B put in place as well but i cant think of them right now as its after 1am

1 potential problem w/ this is underground markets & the increase of bartering - business will, of course, look 4 loopholes 2 get out of paying taxes

but at least the IRS wont hastle joe citizen anymore, they will go after the businesses (multi-national corporations to mom&pop shops) who R cheating

the Dems & other progressives will need 2 make sure that the tax levels R such that basic govt services can still B funded

this is a big change - 1 that i favor, but this type of massive systemic change will need 2 B carefully considered & thoughtfully implemented otherwise there could B disasterous consequences

[Shrike]

This is sweet. We can finally stop spending our money on preparing our taxes. That always irritates the hell out of me.

[BigSugar]

it'll have to be combined with some sort of provision covering internet purchases (which some will vehemently oppose). It puts the burden on those that consume, so in that sense, i like the idea. It seems to work well in countries i've been to that employ a VAT/National Sales Tax idea.

food and food products are routinely excluded, but clothing isn't. I'd love to get rid of one of the most bloated, incongruous messes the govt. ever created, namely the IRS. Call it the National Tax Authority, employ a VAT or National Sales Tax, and cut the damn thing down by 75% immediately. Once more money stays in the pockets of consumers, you'll find that more will be able to consume, and in the end pay their fair portion of the national burdens.

[monkey neck]

In a sense, that gets rid of the double taxation problem (taxing money you make AND the money you spend).

[wileE]

I am all for this, but how long would it last? AofV mentions a whole list of exemptions. Well, why not add charitable exemptions, those shouldn't be taxed. Then, big business will lobby for specific exemptions and so on and so on. Eventually, the tax system would be right back where it is.

[Smoker29]

I've been preaching for years how life would be much easier without the IRS.


I'm all for it.

[aqualou]

Originally posted by Robert Goodman
“If you own property, stock, or, say, one hundred acres of farmland and tax time is approaching, you don’t want to make a mistake, so you’re almost obliged to go to a certified public accountant, tax preparer, or tax attorney to help you file a correct return. That costs a lot of money.
Are they aware that a tax attorney's services are tax deductable?

[wileE]

Originally posted by aqualou

Are they aware that a tax attorney's services are tax deductable?

I am sure they are, but it still costs money. The tax deduction doesn't make it free.

[DaysWithoutEnd]

Originally posted by BigSugar
Once more money stays in the pockets of consumers, you'll find that more will be able to consume, and in the end pay their fair portion of the national burdens.

Trickle-down economics doesn't work. Sorry BigSug. Oh, and of course we all know that sales taxes burden the poor more than the rich. Figures that a big-shot lawyer would be all for it. :p

[Docta]

here we go! boy it does sound great doesn't it? everyone hates the taxman, so get rid of the irs, yay!

what ends up happening?

the middle class becomes the bearer of the majority of the tax burden as a percentage of income as most of their income goes towards non-food consumables.

the poor have their tax burden increased as well going from zero to being forced to pay tax on anything but food. you poor people shouldn't be buying things anything anyhow!

the rich get much much much richer as their income and $$ from interest on sitting money goes tax free.

a wonderful plan, ugh

[markalot]

lol,

everyone has a different idea of what tax is fair. Don't tax food and it's fair, in my book. The poor won't get taxed more because most of their money goes for food. The middle class can choose how much they are taxed, and the upper class will get taxed on every toy they buy. About the only thing I might consider is to remove all sales tax for people under a certain income, but then of course we atart arguing about what income ...

The bottom line is that unless you tax the rich so much you make them middle class the liberals won't be happy.

[BigSugar]

you can't make a VAT or NST income dependent (at point of sale)....how on earth would each individual retailer or seller of goods be able to determine a persons income?

"That shirt will be $8.00. But first, you need to fill out this 10 page income questionairre to determine your eligibility for exemption. Thanx for shopping at Walmart!"

It could be structured to return VAT paid to lower income people upon a simple filing at the end of the year with VAT paid, income, and $ due back. It's easy. No longer would "Richy Rich" be able to buy a cigarette boat and write it off as a business expense, b/c the tax is paid at purchase.

bottom line is, VAT/NST tax is based on consumption. the uber wealthy consume more than the uber poor. the IRS is an out dated behemoth riddled with cancer and needs to be left to die.

[jeffvankirk]

So I guess we are talking a National Sales Tax in the neighborhood of 35-40% on all taxable consumer goods?

Would this eliminate or add to State Tax? Sin Tax? Luxery Tax?

Suddenly my $4.99 12 pack of Natty Light and the gas used to purchase it just costs me $112

[Robert Goodman]

Analysis: GOP push for consumption tax

By CHRISTIAN BOURGE, UPI Congressional and Policy Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- A report Monday that in his upcoming book House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., endorses the elimination of the Internal Revenue Service and replacement of the current tax code with a national consumption tax or flat tax as a top GOP priority in a second Bush administration should come as no surprise, considering that fiscally conservative Republicans have been pushing such ideas for years.

The Drudge Report's brief on Republican plans for eliminating the federal revenue-collection agency and the laws it enforces in favor of a national sale tax, value-added tax or even a flat tax rate on income quotes Hastert in his new tome being released Wednesday -- "Speaker: Lessons from Forty Years in Coaching and Politics" -- as praising such schemes not only as a means to increase domestic productivity and grow the U.S. economy, but also as a way to make the IRS an irrelevant part of the federal government.

Although Hastert's office did not return calls for comment on the report, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, offered a preview of the House GOP leadership's post-election tax agenda in a March speech in which he said the Republicans are determined to repeal the federal income tax.

Long an advocate of a national sales tax, a confident DeLay told a conference of tax lobbyists that House Republicans will have hearings and push the issue in 2005 and 2006.

He said that replacing the income tax, payroll and other related federal taxes would provide more money for people to use, and he endorsed a proposal from Rep. John Linder, R-Ga., for a national sale tax.

However, he added that even a flat tax would be better than the current federal tax model.

Whether or not eliminating the IRS and replacing it with some form of easier-to-collect consumption tax or a uniform tax rate will be "a domestic centerpiece" of the second Bush term remains to be seen, but such alternative tax schemes are nothing new and have long been a controversial wish of numerous prominent, conservative Republicans.

In 1996 Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes championed a 17-percent flat-tax scheme, garnering a great deal of attention and arguably making it the most prominent of the various alternative tax-system ideas floated by conservative Republicans over the last several decades.

Under Forbes' plan, taxes on interest from investment income such as dividends and capital gains, along with other forms of unearned income such as inheritances, would be eliminated, something that would certainly benefit wealthy individuals like the former candidate, who inherited his wealth.

Not that the idea is only favored by conservatives; nor was Forbes the first politician to back the idea.

Former California Gov. Jerry Brown, a liberal Democrat, was a proponent of the flat tax during his failed 1992 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Conservative economists such as Arthur Laffer have also pushed the idea for decades.

More recently, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has backed a uniform 20-percent tax on earned income, with similar exemptions on unearned income.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, continues to promote such ideas as a conservative activist since leaving the lower House of Congress.

The idea of a national sales tax or value-added tax has gained greater favor with some conservatives in recent years, but those ideas, along with other tax-simplification schemes like the flat tax, have remained mostly wishful thinking on the part of conservatives.

Even as Republican leaders in the GOP-led House, Senate and Bush White House have praised the concept of tax simplification over the last 3 1/2 years, the U.S tax code has been expanded by over 10,000 pages as the Bush tax cuts and other changes -- part of a total of 227 changes to the code -- were implemented.

In addition, the House and Senate Republican leadership have been strong backers of the corporate-tax overhaul bill currently pending in Congress.

The measure, which started out as a simple bill to repeal a tax break for exporting companies deemed illegal by the World Trade Organization, has turned into a special-interest tax bonanza in order to make the bill acceptable to more members.

The conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill is that any corporate lobbyist worth his salt got his client a break in the bill.

"These guys have added 10,000 pages to the tax code over the last three years," said one Democratic Leadership aide. "Do you really think they can get it together and repeal the whole code?"

For their part, some Democrats are not taking the pending Republican tax push lying down.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., gave a speech last month pressing the case for simplification of the tax code and promising to make the issue a Democratic caucus priority, offering a plan that differed little from the most recent simplification plans from the GOP not involving wholesale repeal of the tax code.

It is important to note that House Democratic Congressional Conference Chairman Robert Matsui of California and others, including Republican members, acknowledge that changing the code is an extremely difficult challenge.

The last major set of wholesale changes made to U.S. tax law intended to simplify the code was enacted in 1986.

Although Monday's report on Hastert's book was met with little attention on Capitol Hill, the Democratic National Committee released a statement deriding the flat tax as an attempt to shift the federal tax burden to the middle class.

They argue that lowering taxes on the wealthy citizens who pay higher rates under the current progressive tax systems means many poorer citizens will pay higher portions of their income to the federal government.

In addition, they decried the losses of tax breaks for home mortgages and healthcare expenses provided under current law -- losses that have led some conservatives to label the home-mortgage deduction the "third rail" of tax reform.

Some conservatives were emboldened by news last fall that former Iraqi Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer was expanding neoconservative nation-building doctrine to include conservative tax orthodoxy by establishing a 15-percent flat-rate tax in Iraq.

However, Bremer's tax efforts did not actually preclude progressive rates but only capped them at 15 percent and surely are open to interpretation by Iraq's burgeoning self-government apparatus.

Several former Soviet-bloc nations, long a favorite of conservative anti-communist crusaders within the GOP, have become a haven of sorts for the flat tax.

Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and Slovakia, along with Russia itself, have all embraced flat-tax plans as their means to collect taxes from personal earnings.

The Russians, for one, have reported increases in revenue intake vs. their old, complex, higher-rate system.

While the idea of a flat tax or consumption-based tax system still seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream on the domestic front, some economists say we may be closer than it seems at first glance.

Many liberal-minded economists argue that the Bush tax cuts and other GOP efforts to lower taxes on capital gains and investment income have resulted in a tax system that is more regressive than has traditionally been the case.

Since the ultra-rich have higher levels of investment income than those with lower incomes, they end up paying a lower share of taxes, percentage-wise.

But many conservatives dispute the validity of such arguments, and even if it is the case, this by no means is the sort of lower-tax haven that they wish for.

It also remains to be seen if Republicans will be in the position to give it to them anytime in the near future.

Copyright 2004 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.

[jps]

what tax system would you propose if you had to design it without knowing what your socio-economic status would be? You could be poor, you could be rich, or you could be middle class.

To me, it would seem the natural thing that I would want a somewhat progressive tax structure where the wealthiest pay the highest in taxes and the poorest pay little to none. Reason... I could be in any group and I wouldn't want to wake up and find out that with a regressive or flat tax system my expenses run dead even or ahead of my income. I am pretty much middle class right now, and I live near paycheck to paycheck. If my tax burden goes up... and it will have to to pay for the lost tax revenue of charging higher income taxes of the wealthiest 5%, I am squeezed right down to the bottom. If on the other hand i wake up uber wealthy, i would still be wealthy after paying a progressive income tax greater than all other tax brackets. The people that pay 36% or more of their income right now in taxes are still the wealthiest people in the nation.

edit: I never ever thought i would say anything like the above... i hate taxes... and for the most part i feel overtaxed. it is not feasible to eliminate the taxes.

[despondent]

Originally posted by jps


edit: I never ever thought i would say anything like the above... i hate taxes... and for the most part i feel overtaxed. it is not feasible to eliminate the taxes. No but it is feasible for politicians to spend within the bounds of revenue. The IRS has become the poster child for bureaucracy run rampant. I'll believe it's elimination when I see it with my own two eyes.

[yoshomon]

If I make $1000 a month, a 5% tax on the stuff I by is going to be a much bigger deal to me than it is for someone who makes $100000 a month. It ain't rocket science.

Fucking rich leeches still clamoring for more money.

[despondent]

Originally posted by yoshomon
If I make $1000 a month, a 5% tax on the stuff I by is going to be a much bigger deal to me than it is for someone who makes $100000 a month. It ain't rocket science.

Fucking rich leeches still clamoring for more money. yeah, but what about that 5% on a $40M Gulfstream jet?

[despondent]

I would much rather be able to keep ALL of the money I earn and then let it be up to ME to decide how I want to spend it. I am quite capable of determining how much the total purchase price with sales tax included will be. I can then decide if it is in my budget or not.

[jps]

I can't believe I am quoting myself but...

what tax system would you propose if you had to design it without knowing what your socio-economic status would be? You could be poor, you could be rich, or you could be middle class.

Its called being behind the veil of ignorance.

[classicgrrl]

Originally posted by markalot
poor won't get taxed more because most of their money goes for food.

markalot you are FAR too smart to make this big of an error.
most of the poor's money goes toward housing.

edited to add the cynic in me says no matter how you tax folks the rich will always get richer because they are the ones creating it.

[Shrike]

Originally posted by classicgrrl


markalot you are FAR too smart to make this big of an error.
most of the poor's money goes toward housing.

edited to add the cynic in me says no matter how you tax folks the rich will always get richer because they are the ones creating it.
creating what?

[motorcitysonics]

Believe me, the Republicans would not be proposing this if they didn't know it would benefit the rich much more than the poor.

Maybe trickle down economics could work if it was used properly, but so many CEOs are so goddamn greedy that it isn't working and nothing probably would work.

Hey, you greedy CEO types. Just drop your pants and compare penis sizes already.

This is just an election year ploy, there is no way the IRS will be eliminated or massively changed.


I got it. The Democrats could claim their goal is to make health insurance illegal (since it bascially violates every RICO statute anyway), and all Americans get universal health care.

Ain't gonna happen.

[angryj5]

would services be VAT taxed too? if not then everything will become a service, i paid 300 dollars service to walk around target property and they threw in these clothes and shampoo for free, and look no taxes!

[angryj5]

Originally posted by classicgrrl


markalot you are FAR too smart to make this big of an error.
most of the poor's money goes toward housing.

edited to add the cynic in me says no matter how you tax folks the rich will always get richer because they are the ones creating it.

he has another solution then...

...kill kill kill the poor...

[Slar]

The Libertarians have been pushing this for years. Their idea however, is to reduce government to the size where the IRS is no longer needed. The republican plan just moves things around but doesn't really change anything.

http://www.issues2000.org/2004/Michael_Badnarik_Tax_Reform.htm

[markalot]

Originally posted by classicgrrl


markalot you are FAR too smart to make this big of an error.
most of the poor's money goes toward housing.

edited to add the cynic in me says no matter how you tax folks the rich will always get richer because they are the ones creating it.

Woops, glossed over that little fact.

Well, I guess I would exclude housing and food from the tax and raise the tax on everything else to balance it out. As far as showing proof of Income ... that would be tax return time, not at sales time, but there I go complicating the entire tax scheme again, so ...

No taxes on housing costs (including utilities), no tax on food, tax the hell out of everything else.

[mikeatthemadfro]

. I'd love to get rid of one of the most bloated, incongruous messes the govt. ever created, namely the IRS. Call it the National Tax Authority, employ a VAT or National Sales Tax, and cut the damn thing down by 75% immediately. Once more money stays in the pockets of consumers, you'll find that more will be able to consume, and in the end pay their fair portion of the national burdens. [/B][/QUOTE]



I agree with sug.

[ICONOCLAST420]

Originally posted by Slar
The Libertarians have been pushing this for years. Their idea however, is to reduce government to the size where the IRS is no longer needed. The republican plan just moves things around but doesn't really change anything.

http://www.issues2000.org/2004/Michael_Badnarik_Tax_Reform.htm MY BROTHER!!! Finally I have found you!!! VOTE LIBERTARIAN 1-800-ELECT-US

[jps]

There are additional problems...
even if you could pull this off, once you get money into the hands of consumers the ones that have no extra money will buy nothing. Those in the middle will likely use the money to pay down personal debt and save for things like education (unless you are going to exempt that cost also). The wealthy tend to save money and invest in safer, low risk ventures. That means that less money will be spent buying goods, which would drive up supplies, push prices down, and companies would begin laying off employees in order to maintain their own cash flow. Recession follows. Probably stagflation. Oh yeah, i would guess with all of this there would be a sell off in the stock market. Crash. Great Depression part II.

After all this happens though, the plan might work.

[classicgrrl]

Originally posted by Shrike

creating what?

I dont know the proper term for it.
:p
tax system maybe?