Sales Taxes are not Fair Taxes

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

I remember listening to a very well heeled community leader speaking ad nauseam to a group of cornered listeners one evening at a football game regarding his contention that sales tax was the only fair tax - because everybody paid it.  Yes, everyone does pay it, but the poor, who must spend a greater percentage of their income in order to just survive than their rich counterparts do, obviously feel more actual pain from sales taxes.  Taxes on the sales of goods and services place a far greater actual burden on the poor than they do on the rich.  That is why sales taxes are regarded to be "regressive" taxes - and it is also why the rich and comfortable tend to look favorably on the idea.

Republicans see a need for government, whether they will admit it or not.  They need a strong military to defend the nation that allows them to create wealth.  They need police to protect their property and things which they have accumulated, and they need roads, bridges, rail lines, airports, harbors, and many other forms of infrastructure to bring raw materials to their factories and to get their assembled products to market,  And they even need prisons to warehouse people who might otherwise interfere with the free flow of commerce.

 Government is essential, and even Republicans know it - but they just don't like paying for it.

Finding more and more ways to shift the burden of financing government onto the backs of the poor has long been a GOP wet dream, and one proposal for doing that is a national sales tax.  

HR25, the "Fair Tax Act," is a plan that would eliminate most federal taxes and replace them with a national sales tax - and in the process would also eliminate a need for the GOP's favorite boogeyman, the Internal Revenue Service.  The proposed national sales tax would be 23%, though many economists argue that when implemented it would actually come closer to being 30 percent.  Some GOP legislators have been introducing this bill since 1999, but it has never been given a floor vote.  Some of those same politicians now feel that with Kevin McCarthy's tenuous hold on the House speakership, this may be the year that the merits of a national sales tax will at last be debated publicly and presented for a vote on the House floor.

One feature of this year's proposed national sales tax is a monthly "prebate" where every household would get a set amount ahead of time to cover taxes on essentials like groceries and medicines - every household, from the poorest to those of billionaires - "fair."

The idea won't pass, at least not this year, but Republicans are planting a seed, creating a talking point that sales taxes are the fairest taxes, and some day they hope to bring in that harvest.

But for the time-being, the idea that sales taxes are fair, especially to the working poor, still looks, smells, and tastes like baloney.