Latest Book: The Fair Tax Solution

Last week my wife went to the County library and tried to find some weird personal finance book to keep me busy for a while. What she brought back was a very interesting and fast read called The Fair Tax Solution by Ken Hoagland. The idea is to get rid of the current incredibly complicated federal tax system and replace it with a set federal retail sales tax that would also eliminate the FICA and Medicare taxes. The premise sounds much too easy to work, but the book was quite convincing. It is difficult to think of any big negatives of the plan besides the elimination of the complete "income tax" industry (tax accountants everywhere, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, TurboTax, etc.) and the very cumbersome transition from the huge current tax infrastructure in place to the simplified sales tax. I am surprised we have not heard more about this idea. It sounds like Mike Huckabee was a big supporter back before the 2008 election, but the idea died down back since the election. I checked around on the Internet and have found quite a few pieces against the Fair Tax saying that it would be regressive, hurting the poor more and helping the wealthy. That is the opposite of what the book said, so now I do not know who to believe. The FairTax.org site has a cool calculator on it, and I plugged my numbers in to see what would happen. Despite being somewhat over the median income level, we came out way ahead, but that is also with the 23% rate which many people think is too low to balance the federal balance. Hey, it sounds like a good idea if they could get the numbers to work out for the federal budget. Can't our government look at some type of real tax reform?

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