A Challenge to Fair Tax Supporters

I've been reading web sites promoting the Fair Tax.

Most the sites do little except repeat empty talking points. Most of the talking points are absurd.

The Fair Tax will not eliminate the need for a tax collector and audits. There will still be a Treasury Department that collects the taxes and audits businesses.

The Fair Tax is not a true consumption tax. It is a tax on businesses. The flow of the money determines the nature of the tax. Money in the FairTax flows from business to the government. Money in a consumption tax flows from consumers to the government.

The Fair Tax places a massive 23% tax on the sale of new consumer goods and services. This sounds intriguing. The idea falls about when one attempts to apply it to the extremely complex supply chains in the current work world.

The FairTax attempts to place a uniform sales tax on all goods and services. If you look at state and local sales taxes, you will find that they are highly differentiated. A hotel pays a different tax rate than a department store. Many places tax food at a lower rate than clothes. Gas and utilities have a truly strange mix of taxes embedded in the price. In some places, Papa Murphy's Pizza iis taxed at a different rate than Domino's.

It is common for charities and government agencies to go untaxed.

When we have a sales tax in place, business associations will hit Capitol Hill with a vengeance demanding special treatment for their tax concerns. The FairTax will quickly devolve into a lobbyist's dream and a citizen's nightmare.

State Sales Tax is already highly differentiated. The idea that a National Sales Tax will remain pure is absurd.

The Fair Tax does not decrease political targeting. It actually makes it more problematic.

With the FairTax, all businesses will need to apply for tax IDs. All businesses will be subject to audit.

The Tax Scandals of 2013 involved the IRS delaying the processing of tax status applications for Tea Party groups. The Fair Tax gives the IRS (or whatever the new entity is called) the mandate to process tax applications and audits on a business by business basis.

You can be certain that the IRS will take the nature of the business into account when processing the tax filings and audits.

The Fair Tax does not decrease class warfare. It actually makes it worse.

The FairTax is a massive tax placed on business owners. The Fair Tax takes money from business owners and gives it to voters (who no longer directly pay taxes) in the form of a prebate.

A socioeconomic system in which the business owners pay all the taxes and the people receive the benefits will have even worse class related clashes than we have today.

A truly fair tax would have everyone processed through the same tax structure.

We can move toward such a reform without the disruption of the FairTax.

I engaged in a fun experiment in which I applied the general principles of computer system design to tax reform. I called the reform The Object Tax after Object Oriented Programming. OOPs is a programming method used in modern operating systems. It's used in the design of web browsers, smart phones, and the Internet itself.

I jammed out a short blog post called: "The Object Tax in a Nutshell."

I put forward to the Fair Tax crowd an open challenge to debate the FairTax. In the debate we will compare it to incremental reform made in The Object Tax.

The Western Conservative Summit will be in Denver on July 26th. I can't afford a ticket to WCS and I wouldn't expect them to host the debate anyway. The debate could take place on the July 24th or July 25th.

The gauntlet is down. Are any of the supporters of the Fair Tax brave enough to put their precious FairTax?

PS: I've never engaged in public debates, nor have I ever engaged in public speaking. Even though I have never spoken in front of an audience, I could destroy the fair tax in a debate because the Fair Tax is a phenomenally bad and disruptive idea.

You can take up my challenge on my contact form.