Kentucky Tea Party group, ignores details, endorses the very unfair Fair Tax.

Kentucky is horse country yet some people who live here still don't know why draft horses wear blinders. In case you are unaware of what blinders are, they are masks placed on the outside of a horses eyes to prevent it from seeing what is around it. In other words, to keep the horse looking straight ahead and not get distracted. And don't forget, the horse doesn't put the blinders on himself, someone has to do it.

Photo by: Kersti Nebelsiek, Wikipedia Commons

So now we have a proposed new tax bill submitted in Congress last January that would eliminate the Federal Income Tax, eliminate the IRS and all those nasty tax collectors, eliminate all those nasty Federal taxes that some or most people are required to pay and substitute it for a whopping 23% Federal Sales Tax on everyone. The bill tracking web site, Open Congress, described the provisions of HR 25, the bill written by Republican Congressman Rob Woodall from Georgia. In exchange for getting rid of all those nasty taxes and those nasty tax collectors, HR 25, the so-called Fair Tax bill would cause everyone to pay a 23% Federal Sales Tax on top of all state and local sales, property and use taxes for the "use or consumption of all goods, properties and services". Since the bill only eliminates current Federal Taxes it has no affect on state and local taxes. That means everyone's utility bills would go up 23%, everyone's property taxes would go up 23%, along with the gasoline in your car and the car registration and the insurance you buy for your car and your home, movie theater tickets and, of course, all the clothing and other hard line merchandise you buy. But how about your doctor's visits or prescriptions or your food, will they also go up 23%? And in case these myopic Tea Party conservatives didn't realize it, Senior Citizens who subside on pensions and Social Security, don't pay any Income Tax now because they don't have income. So now this proposed bill will add an additional 23% hardship on every retired person living in America. The dumbest statement in their email that announced the meeting to promote this bill was "The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend on new goods or services, not on what we earn." Retired people usually spend all of their pensions on the things they need and have little left over.

OpenCongress Summary

This bill would eliminate all federal income taxes, payroll taxes and the estate tax, and replace them with a federal sales tax of 23% on the use or consumption of all goods, properties and services. The Internal Revenue Service would be abolished and replaced by an Excise Tax Bureau and a Sales Tax Bureau in the Department of the Treasury.

From an email by the Northern Kentucky Tea Party:

The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment. The FairTax Act (HR 25, S 13) is nonpartisan legislation.
 
It abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment taxes and replaces them with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax administered primarily by existing state sales tax authorities. The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend on new goods or services, not on what we earn. The FairTax is a fair, efficient, transparent, and intelligent solution to the frustration and inequity of our current tax system.

The Northern Kentucky Tea Party has done a few good things in the past but they have also taken some strange, off-the-wall positions on other issues. They have pushed for a new Constitutional Convention while ignoring the warnings from the experts that said such a convention could rewrite the entire Constitution and throw out our Bill of Rights. I made this point in one of the first posts in this blog on Tuesday, September 8, 2009: Beware of a new Constitutional Convention.  Now the Tea Party is pushing another proposal without paying attention to the details. And the fact is, the Devil is in the details.

And, just as Barack Hussein Obama has issued exemptions to his socialized medicine Obamacare law to all of his union supporters, it can be anticipated that if and when this FairTax law passes that we will all be begging the Federal government to exempt something we are required to pay an additional 23% on. There is nothing fair about that.