FairTax Friday: Compliance Costs

Our tax code is 67,204 pages long. Don't believe me? Google "67,204 page tax code". Still doubting.......? Now, do you know what the "compliance burden" is? The compliance burden is the cost of dealing with our asinine 67,204 page tax code! It's the time and money people spend on filling out tax forms, hiring accountants and tax lawyers, keeping records for tax purposes, researching tax laws etc. etc. etc. It's the $60 you spent on TurboTax last year PLUS the $30 or so that you paid for the "filing fee." It's the hours that you spent going through your W-2, banking records, investment statements etc. in order to fill out the tax forms when you could have spent that time making money, playing with your kids, reading a book, watching TV or doing any number of other things. It's the thousands of dollars you spent paying an accountant to do this for you. Oh, and those groceries you bought yesterday, a percentage of the money you gave Kroger goes towards their costs of paying tax lawyers and accountants to do the same thing. Am I making myself clear?

The act of figuring out how much we are supposed to pay in taxes literally costs us billions of dollars per year! And THEN we pay taxes on top of that. You see, folks, it's essentially a double tax. The word "tax" doesn't necessarily mean "a charge... imposed by authority." It is also defined as "a heavy demand." Complying with 67,204 pages of tax code sure a heck qualifies as a heavy demand! In 2005 this cost was estimated at $265,100,000,000....... yes, that's $265 billion! It's well over $300 billion now. What if that $300+ billion was invested in other parts of the economy? The IRS also ate up $10,200,000,000..... $10.2 billion of our taxpayer dollars in 2005. What if that was eliminated?

Oh, and speaking of paying people to prepare taxes, everyone knows that whether or not you actually pay income taxes, you still have to file an income tax return, right? There is a group of people out there that qualify for the "Earned Income Tax Credit" (I could go off on this program right now, but I'll restrain myself). In short, the EITC is a government program set up to literally give money to people who don't pay income taxes. Again, this program gives people money from the Treasury when they have put in zero themselves. These people must file a tax return in order to get (steal?) this money. The government pays for many of them to get these returns prepared. In 2001, the government paid these non-taxpayers $1.9 billion JUST TO FILE THEIR RETURNS!!! Talk about a waste of our money!!!

All of this is eliminated with the FairTax! It's soooooo easy! All taxes are paid at the retail level. When you go buy a Coke, mattress, new house, car, pencil, apple, stapler etc. you pay your taxes. The beauty of it is that if you don't spend anything, you don't pay taxes. If you want to invest an extra $10,000 in a home or the stock market, you don't pay taxes on it. That's why it's FAIR!

Recap:
1. The FairTax eliminates all Federal taxes and allows workers to keep 100% of their paychecks.
2. The FairTax, by eliminating Federal taxes, also eliminates corporate taxes, thus allowing businesses to lower their prices.
3. The FairTax eliminates the cost of complying with taxes. That means NO MORE buying TurboTax or paying accountants and tax services to do your taxes. NO MORE digging through files, papers etc. to file your taxes. NO MORE spending hours and hours working on your tax returns.

Does anyone have any questions so far? Any thoughts? Or are you just excited, like me, at the possibility of this becoming reality?