RIP GOP’s Fair Tax Act?

Replacing income with a national sales tax sounds cool but is devil in details as GOP obsession may again give Dems beat down issue in 2024 with a complex system in the name of simplicity AND Sphinx-like tax burden?

As WSJ says in “GOP’s Fair Tax” op ed, it would be one thing if Congress was writing a federal tax code & replacing the IRS “from scratch”. But, that train left the station long ago as the so-called reform (floated many times before) would replace the much maligned agency with a new Sales Tax Bureau & Excise Tax Bureau; and, only God know what it would do to us. As the editors noted: “The new bureaucracies would have to keep track of the inevitable exceptions to the tax introduced by politicians that would erode the tax base.” Whatch’a mean? A 30% tax on food and healthcare would hit exactly who the hardest? Not Hollywood elites, you say? The GOP bill would offset the tax’s “regressive nature” in part by a hefty new rebate, “charmingly titled a ’family consumption allowance.’” But, then, consider the state and local sales taxes (as well as income taxes) wouldn’t be touched. And, what’s to say a future progressive Congress wouldn’t reinstitute the federal income tax on top of the new national sales tax, e.g., to save the planet from their often-contradictory green policies?

The Dems & President Biden are already quick to point out the Fair Tax Act would “raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items, from groceries to gas.” WSJ’s hope: Have the GOP leadership again come back to its senses & kill its Freedom Caucasus’s well-intentioned but moldy, mine-riddled idea in the House Ways & Means Cte.

Davd Soul