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rightwriting
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taxation
"The power to tax involves
the power to destroy." John Marshall, McCulloch v.
Maryland
The current income tax code
is too complex, too intrusive, and a burden upon American
citizens and businesses. Moreover, the Internal Revenue
Service has abused its powers and terrorized taxpayers as
evidenced by recent testimony before Congress. During the
past few legislative sessions, Congress has moved in a
positive direction by reforming the Internal Revenue
Service, but drastic action is still necessary.
The issue of taxation can be a sleepy one for the American
public, but it's an issue that conservative political
leaders must continue to push because taxation goes to the
very heart of the public debate over the size and role of
government. Government at the national, state, or local
level has no power without tax revenue. Revenue is the very
source of government power. Consequently, if revenue is
restrained, government is restrained.
Most families are working harder than they ever did today
just to be able to pay their taxes. Every other wage earner
works to pay the government. And the government just takes
the money while you're struggling to raise your kids, or
care for an elderly parent, or buy a house, or work yourself
through college, or start a business. Taxes do more than
impose a burden, as Chief Justice John Marshall said "the
power to tax involves the power to destroy."
President Bush's tax cuts need to be made permanent. During
the course of the presidential campaign, Bush made it clear
that the tax cut was going to be fair to the American
people. Republicans, in general, never subscribed to the
Washington talk about targeted tax cuts. Republicans felt
that a targeted tax cut meant people in Washington got to
decide who won and who didn't win; that simply isn't the
best tax policy -- the best tax relief policy was to say, if
you pay taxes, you get relief, everybody who pays taxes in
America deserves a tax cut.
So, under the President's plan, all rates will be
cut. Everybody who pays taxes is going to get not only tax
relief this year, but tax relief in the coming years. During
the course of his reelection campaign, the president also
said how unfair the marriage penalty was. The marriage
penalty is unfair, and President Bush, through this tax
bill, has eased the penalty of marriage in the tax code
coming down the road. Small business owners, farmers, and
ranchers, are demanding that their assets not be taxed
twice. The death tax is unfair. Under the bill the president
signed into law, the death tax in the American tax code was
finally eliminated.
Continued tax relief is the right thing to do. Once the
president's budget met basic needs, with a reasonable growth
in the budget, instead of increasing the size of your
federal government, what we decided to do was to put faith
in the American people. The country is better off if its
citizens decide how to spend the money.
It's a fundamental difference of opinion between
conservatives and liberals. For the liberals who voted
against tax relief, they basically said to the American
people, we can spend your money better than you can.
Those who benefit from the current tax code - namely tax
attorneys and accountants - spend thousands of dollars
lobbying members of Congress to maintain the status
quo. It's a shame that such specialists are required to make
sense out of an arcane and complicated system.
The time has come to not only scrap the income tax but to
also abolish the Internal Revenue Service, which itself
costs tax-payers billions of dollars each year just to
collect revenue.
A national sales tax has 3 distinct advantages over the
current system:
1. Simplicity - Collection would take place at the
point-of-sale.
2. Enforcement - Tax fraud would be virtually eliminated.
3. Control - Citizens would be paid their actual salaries by
employers and then would decide what to do with the money. |
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