Subject: Income Tax in Un-American Comment: Panel Members: The Great American Experiment has come to another crossroads. Like that crisis 150 years ago when the nation was forced to reconcile how this nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, could continue to allow one class of citizens to be held in servitude to another. The current economic slavery the Income Tax system imposes by the the forcible usurpation of the fruits of a man's labors and the judging of the activities a man puts his life to (by taxing different uses differently) is the antithesis of what it is to be American. The Income Tax in the abstract violates the basic premises that we are a free people. The day-to-day realities of administering the present peculiar system with 55,000 pages of ways and means to mitigate and ameliorate the evil that the process imposes bears strong witness to the underlying knowledge that the system is wrong. The waste of 8.6 billion hours of American's time each year being forced to subject themselves to self destructive accounting and the gross inefficiencies of a system that costs the payer hundreds of billions of dollars to collect the 2 trillion dollars argues against the system. If the business of America is business, the current system which strangles job growth, productivity and entrepreneurship is truly UN-American. Many things point to advisability of a consumption tax. Most important is the transparency of a sales tax. We the people would again have a clear sense of what we are spending and what we are buying when we pay taxes to get the government we deserve. The proposed system of the so-called FairTax has many added benefits. First, many argue that removing the poorest from the tax rolls is a good thing, an American thing, the FairTax does this -- not just removing them from taxation on their income, but also removing the hidden taxation already on every product in the American economy which we all pay. Further, by the structure of returning taxed dollars up to the poverty level the system becomes defacto progressive on those who spend money above and beyond subsistence levels. Those who wantonly consume pay ever increasing percentages of their available resources in taxes (up to the ceiling of 23% of the retail values of products). Those looking to reduce their contributions can use their God-given, American creativity to provide for the wants and needs of themselves and their families without breaking the law (no matter how Un-American those laws may be). Thank you for the opportunity to advise you of my ongoing concerns to the Income Tax system, Please recommend to the President that the 16th Amendment be overturned, the IRS disbanded and the collection of taxes by replaced by the National Retail Sales Tax as stipulated in "the FairTax" (currently H.R25/S.25). Respectfully Submitted, Mark A. Pearson, M.A. 777 E. Haney Rd. Carbondale, IL 6290 |