FairTax Quotes

“Just what do we tax under our current system? Work, that’s what. Hard work and productivity. The harder you work, the more you achieve. The more you achieve, the more you’re taxed. To make matters worse, under our “progressive” income tax system, the harder you work, the more severe the punishment actually is!”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“The Social Security system is a $75 trillion problem. Again, just to give you a sense of scale: Let’s say you started a business the day Jesus Christ was born. Let’s say you weren’t exactly a good businessman, and your business lost a million dollars every day—right through yesterday. How much longer would it take before your losses added up to $1 trillion? About 718 more years should do it, give or take a few months. And that’s just one trillion. Multiply that by seventy-five, and you have the size of the Social Security problem. That’s the amount it would take to fully fund Social Security for all current workers and retirees. To realize the magnitude of the problem we’re facing, consider the fact that the total of all wealth in America is about $60 trillion. We could confiscate every item of value from every American household, including cash and investments, and apply the value to the problem—and still not have enough money to fund Social Security fully.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“Let’s pause a moment to think about how much $1 trillion really is. Such large-scale economic matters are often discussed in terms of trillions, but how many people really understand how much a trillion is?
Let’s say you've been told you have to wait for something very special for one million seconds. How long would your wait be? A little more than eleven and a half days. But what if you had to wait for one billion seconds? Well, you’d be waiting a little longer: try almost thirty-two years.
And for one trillion seconds? We’ll round it off to 31,700 years.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“The fact that FairTax principles haven’t already been passed into law is an indication of failure at every level of politics in every party. It’s also an indication of the fear most politicians feel at the thought of a tax system without all those little hiding places they love to manipulate for their own benefit.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“No longer would other nations, other economies, be taking business and jobs away from the U.S. economy by enacting their own valuable tax reform and simplification measures. As these nations have enjoyed steady gains, we have distracted ourselves with a cacophony of politicians, from both sides of the aisle, yammering about their favorite ideas for using our federal tax code to punish people they don’t like while rewarding people and industries they do.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“The underground economy. Our present complex tax code allows—even encourages—people to go “under the radar.” How bad is this problem? Well, estimates are that the underground economy—those dealing in illegal or illicit behavior such as drugs or other off-the-books labor—amounts to between $1.5 trillion and $3 trillion per year.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“The joint committee invited economists of many economic stripes to model what would happen if America switched from the current code to a unified income tax or a consumption tax. Every economist who modeled reported that the consumption tax would increase long-term economic growth.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“When Bill Archer (R-Tex.) was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he routinely quoted an informal survey of five hundred international companies located in Europe and Japan. These companies were asked, “What would you do in your long-term planning if the United States eliminated all taxes on capital and labor and taxed only personal consumption?” Eighty percent—that’s four hundred out of five hundred companies—said they would build their next plant in America. The remaining 20 percent—the other hundred companies—said they would relocate their business to America altogether.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“[A] Harvard University study [showed] that, on average, about 22 percent of what you pay for any consumer item or service represents the embedded costs in that item—that is, the embedded costs of our current tax system. Taxes, like some other similarly offensive substances, roll downhill, and you the consumer are standing at the bottom.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“Whenever passion prevails over reason, truth becomes a casualty.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“It is interesting to note that under our original Constitution the highest office for which citizens could vote was their member of the House of Representatives. Senators were chosen by the legislatures of the several states, and the president was selected by an electoral college. Our founding fathers designed a government in which the true power rests in the House, a body the electorate can change completely every two years. It is thus quite sad that so many Americans concentrate so heavily on our quadrennial presidential beauty contest.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“Businesses and other organizations spend more than six billion hours each year complying with the federal tax code. Estimated compliance costs conservatively top $225 billion annually—costs that are ultimately embedded in retail prices paid by consumers.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“One word: power.
The more politicians can control your access to your own wealth and earnings, the more powerful they are. The more politicians can affect businesses and important business decisions with tax policy, the more powerful they are. The more they can adversely affect the financial picture of one segment of our economy for the benefit of another, the more powerful they are. The more politicians can pander to the petty fears and jealousies of people by punishing high achievers for their efforts, the more powerful they are.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“A Tax Foundation study for 2002 has found that taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes under $20,000 incur a compliance cost of 4.53 percent of income compared to only 0.29 percent for taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes over $200,000.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“History lesson, folks: The tax system we have today—the one we've come to know and love—began ninety-four years ago as a (drum roll, please) flat tax! The monstrosity you see today is a flat tax on income after nearly a century of very imperfect evolution. At first, only a very small percentage of Americans were asked to pay income tax. In fact, that’s how they sold it to us—as a tax on the rich!
Well, that all changed with World War II. The cost of the war effort led to an expansion of those who paid federal income taxes—and we were off to the races. The tax code was flattened again, if you will, in 1986. Since that time it has been amended 16,000 times. We now have more than 67,000 pages of statutes and regulations—which helps explain why, last year, nearly two-thirds of all tax filers had to seek professional help with their tax return.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“The FairTax takes current individual taxpayers out of the tax collection and payment business altogether. Just how many people would that be? Try 165 million. That’s 165 million people who at present need to be watched, and perhaps audited, by the IRS to ensure compliance. With the FairTax, we’ll have about 25 million businesses to watch instead of 165 million taxpayers… Further, the states and the feds—at least in the forty-five states that have sales taxes—will be looking at the same companies.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“[W]hen you look at who’ll be collecting this tax, the chances of drumming up a conspiracy suddenly look even worse. In America, .03 percent of all of America’s companies—688 companies, to be exact—sell 48.5 percent of all of the merchandise. Those companies aren't going to help you cheat; there’s simply too much at stake. Date also show that 3.6 percent of all of America’s companies—92,334 firms—collectively make 85.7 percent of all sales…
When it comes to the services sector, the fact is that 1.2 percent of all businesses make approximately 80 percent of the sales in the services sector. They have too much to lose to risk helping you cheat. Even if the FairTax were paid only by these few companies, we would still have a better collection rate than the IRS currently has with the income tax.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“Let’s look at the state of tax cheating under the current system. In 2001, the last year for which information is available, the IRS reports that it collected $345 billion less than it was owed—or about 16 percent of all that was owed, a figure known as “the tax gap”.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“[O]ne macroeconomic study of the FairTax—a study that assumed that the employer’s share of the payroll tax is the only tax savings that will be used to lower prices—estimated that prices would rise by 24.8 percent but wages would increase by 27.4 percent, more than compensating for the increase in prices. By these calculations, disposable income is expected to increase by 1.7 percent.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“Because consumption comes from three sources: income, savings, and borrowings. Stating the obvious, income comes only from income. Our point? FairTax opponents will tell you that the consumption base, the base for national sales tax, isn’t stable and can’t be trusted—but in reality it’s the income tax base that’s unstable and can’t be trusted. The consumption base is much more predictable.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“[T]he last major effort to simplify the income tax system was passed in 1986; succeeding Congresses have amended it sixteen thousand times in the last twenty years.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the Republic. —Benjamin Franklin”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“The Internal Revenue Code cannot simply be “fixed,” which is amply demonstrated by more than 35 years of attempted tax code reform, each round resulting in yet more complexity and unrelenting, page-after-page, mind-numbing verbiage (now exceeding 54,000 pages containing more than 2.8 million words).”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

“we have a very strange relationship with success in this country. Everyone wants it, but a vocal minority insists on denigrating those who have achieved it.”
― Neal Boortz, FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics