There Were A Few Years That I Paid A Million Dollars In Taxes. I Felt So Proud To Be An American

Republicans Who Hate Our Country Are Anti-Tax

When Georgia crackpot Buddy Carter introduced his bill to scrap the progressive tax code and substitute a 30% sales tax instead, he had 30 cosponsors. The proposal was very voted on. During the brouhaha over whether or not McCarthy would be allowed to become Speaker, he conceded that Carter’s so-called “Fair Tax” (H.R. 25) would get a vote. This time he has 25 co-sponsors. He had 26 but Blake Moore (R-UT) withdrew his sponsorship. Five of the co-sponsors from the last Congress are no longer in the House (Mo Brooks, Steve Chabot, Jody Hice, Markwayne Mullin, Don Young). Tom Emmer, a 2021 sponsor, is now Majority Whip and he didn’t sign up this time around. Carter found some new co-sponsors this time though:

• Marjorie Traitor Greene (Q-GA)

• Eric Burlison (R-MO)

• Greg Steube (R-FL)

• Mike Collins (R-GA)

Carter’s proposal would be a massive win for the ultra-rich and would significantly shift more of the tax burden onto the working class and middle class. It scraps the income tax, the estate tax, the payroll tax and all corporate taxes, as well as the IRS. It’s popular on Hate Talk Radio but even the dean of anti-tax activists, Grover Norquist called it “suicidal” and a disaster for the movement and “a political gift to Biden and the Democrats. Last month, Jim Swift, termed it an opportunity for the House Republicans to walk the plank. “Fair Tax idea,” he wrote, “has never really had any serious support because it’s not a serious proposal, but a bit of niche talk-radio kitsch from a generation ago. Yet it has become a right of passage for Georgia Republicans to introduce it as the panacea to big government— by means of a federal 23 percent tax inclusive sales tax. (That 23 percent number is misleading— calculated the normal way, the tax exclusive rate is actually 30 percent.) If a federal sales tax were to match current government tax revenues, the actual rate would have to be higher.”

Bruce Bartlett [under H.W. Bush], the former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury, eviscerated the Fair Tax in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2007, when then-Gov. Mike Huckabee was campaigning on the idea. (Bartlett also wrote an in-depth research paper for Tax Notes, if you care to take a deep dive.) He concluded: “The FairTax is too good to be true, and voters should not take seriously any candidate who supports it.”

Indeed, nobody has ever taken the Fair Tax seriously.

Not in the years after the Tea Party wave, when the House Ways and Means Committee under Paul Ryan and Dave Camp dedicated years and numerous hearings to the subject of tax reform.

Not in 2011, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry briefly campaigned in support of the Fair Tax, only to quietly walk back his support and switch to a flat tax proposal.

Not in 2017, when the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Not in the last Congress, when Jamie Dupree wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the proposal was “barely breathing,” with 21 co-sponsors, a big step down from the 75 supporters it had in 2016.

No, not until the desperate Kevin McCarthy needed to cut every possible deal to become speaker did the Fair Tax get taken seriously.

…[W]hy promise a vote on such a loser? Going straight to the floor poses risks, given the slim GOP majority. It’s a lose-lose situation: Vote yes, and the House Republican Conference looks frivolous, to say nothing of the messaging gift they would give Democratic speechwriters in 2024 (“Republicans want to instate a 30-plus percent federal sales tax!”). Vote no, and invite primaries by far-right candidates who will accuse you of siding with Democrats when given a chance to abolish the IRS. There’s a reason Republicans have never brought any of the previous versions of the Fair Tax to a vote before.

It’s possible that McCarthy agreed to a floor vote expecting moderates to break ranks and the bill to fail by a spectacular margin. That would drive a stake through the heart of the Fair Tax. But this interpretation probably gives him too much credit.

What’s likelier is that McCarthy knew this was a promise he could break. He never said anything about when he would bring the bill to the floor, and he has plenty of more important votes ahead. It is certainly not lost on him that some of these upcoming votes could occasion a rebellion that might threaten his hard-won speaker’s gavel.

This morning, Semafor looked at how Carter’s bill is haunting the 2024 GOP presidential field. DeSantis repeatedly co-sponsored it when he was a far right Freedom Caucus loon in Congress. So did Mike Pence when he was in Congress. And when he was running for Congress in 2010, Mike Pompeo said he supports it. Nikki Haley backed it when she was governor of South Carolina.

Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Shelby Talcott wrote that “The trail of quotes and endorsements could leave candidates vulnerable to election attacks— and not just from Democrats. A source close to Donald Trump said that his rivals would have to ‘answer for what they supported and what they've advocated in the past,’ including a Fair Tax bill ‘that ultimately increases the tax rate on the people who are hurting the most under Biden's economy.’ The Trump campaign is expected to release a video outlining the former president’s own tax position soon and the source said the former president ‘would not support a tax that ultimately gives a higher tax rate to lower and middle-income Americans.’”

I asked some Democrats what they make of this crackpot proposal the Freedom Caucus is pushing. Ted Lieu, a member of congressional leadership, kind of summed up with most House Dems are thinking. He said, simply “Democrats deliver. From capping insulin at $35 for Medicare recipients to bringing back chip manufacturing to the US to funding the highest number of climate change projects in world history, Democrats are making America a better place. Extreme MAGA Republicans cause chaos and have really stupid ideas, like a 30% national sales tax. A sales tax of that magnitude would crash our economy and hurt poor Americans who can't afford to pay 30% more for everyday items. It's a bizarre, out of touch proposal.”

Victoria Luevanos is running for the state Senate in Virginia this year and, as you may recall, has been endorsed by Blue America— please consider giving her a hand here. I asked her what she thinks about this tax and how it’s going to go over in her swing district. She started by flat out calling it “disgusting.”

[T]his is a horribly regressive tax which will put the tax burden heavily on lower and middle class Americans, opposed to the progressive taxes we use seeing that the less you make the less you get taxed the more you make, the more you should contribute (but we know with tax loopholes and corporate welfare they don't). This is another tax gift from Republicans to rich people and their corporate billionaire donors, we've already seen the harm Trump's failure of a tax plan hurt working families. Making everything 30% more expensive but in the process millionaires and billionaires will be saving millions and billions, and this short sighted plan will not generate enough revenue to fund the federal government thus growing the deficit even more drastically cutting spending to the military and their families, veterans services, and all other government departments. How will Republicans recommend to remedy those cuts? They've told us, they will push to cut Social Security, Medicaid, public school funding, infrastructure, etc. Seeing an additional federal 30% tax on everything you buy (gas, groceries, bills, rent, cars, clothes, shoes, medicine, medical supplies, LITERALLY. EVERY. PURCHASE. you make) will bankrupt the middle class pushing millions of American families into poverty allowing rich people to hoard and hide their wealth. You know what another kicker is, Republicans have left this 30% an open ended question so 30% isn't the maximum that will be allowed to be enforced on you, losing the revenue they're not foreseeing, states that rely on federal funding will increase those taxes to offset their mistakes, so they might see 50%.

Any politician who supports this proposal should have not only their intelligence questioned by voters but their finances investigated because we should see how they plan to survive this while their voters lose their livelihood. It baffles me that Republicans like to claim that the federal government collecting income tax is some sort of theft but the federal government forcing a 30%+ consumer goods and services tax is okay to do. Republicans can't even be trusted to correctly inform working families; we shouldn't trust them to fix our problems, we know these proposals are coming from lobbyists not families.

And taking up Victoria’s question about trusting the federal government, in conjunction with yesterday’s State of the Union address, Patriotic Millionaires took a look a Jason Smith, the new chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, the House’s chief tax-writing committee. “With so much power over our tax code, the House Ways and Means Committee has the ability to do an incredible amount of good or bad. Unfortunately, given its new head in the 118th Congress, we’re likely to see much, much more of the latter… Smith doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to supporting tax policies that advance the interests of working Americans— in fact, he has one of the worst. We shouldn’t hold our breath and expect him to act differently now that he’s Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.”

The Fair Tax Act (the 30% sales tax) is supported by Smith. [It] is as extreme and regressive as tax policy can get. Back in 2004, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that, if it passed, the poorest 80% of Americans would face an average $3,200 tax hike while the richest 1% would receive an average $225,000 tax cut. If the estimates were that bad in 2004, we can only imagine how much worse they would be today… During his decade-long tenure in Congress, Smith has done more to hurt, rather than help, his constituents in Missouri’s 8th district— which, incidentally, is one of the poorest Congressional districts in the country. His constituents need a boost, and it’s a shame that Smith hasn’t delivered for them. If he says that he wants to help working Americans as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he’s certainly had a weird way of showing it over the past ten years.”

Last night, Biden proposed quadrupling the tax on corporate stock buybacks— from 1% to 4%— and renewed his calls for a minimum tax on billionaires, not popular with conservatives.