The night President Trump was elected to serve his second term as president was 50 years to the day after I won my first race for the Georgia House of Representatives. Since that time, I’ve served 14 years in the Georgia House,18 years in Congress and have written and spoke on politics for another 20 or so years. I’m old.

There were times during those years when I thought I was pretty important, but then my wife would always remind me of Bill Hudnut. Bill was elected to Congress from Indiana in 1972. He said the first call he received after being elected to Congress was from a lady complaining about her garbage collection. He said, Ma’am, I’ve just been elected to serve you in the Congress of the United States of America. Don’t you think you should call the sanitation department? She said, I really didn’t want to go that high.

Since that night 50 years ago there have been 13 presidential elections and 12 off-year elections. And, as I recall, every one of them was the most important election of our lifetimes.

This election is different.

Let me begin by saying something that may surprise you. This election isn’t about Donald Trump. This election is about you. I know a lot of you have made up your minds about President Trump and nothing I say here is going to change that. That’s fine. I’m not here to talk about him. I’m here to ask you to look past him, at what’s been happening to the party that used to compete with him. Because whatever you think of the past, the ballot in front of you this year is, more than anything, about you and the future.

Thirty years ago, we fought Bill Clinton over welfare, healthcare, crime, the environment, taxes and abortion among other things.

There were “Blue Dog Democrats” who leaned conservative and liberal Republicans who leaned to the left, and all of the debates were fierce, but healthy, and all were among people of good will.

The Democrats sincerely wanted to improve the lives of Americans and were also sincere in believing that the way to do so was through more government programs. A good example was the Clinton Crime Bill that insisted on midnight basketball leagues with mandated diversity among the players and teams. Republicans were more inclined to punish wrong doers. We believed different things. But we debated them honestly.

Republicans also want to improve the lives of Americans but we believe that the way to do that is by creating businesses and increasing the number of jobs and increasing the size of the economy. We believe, as President Kennedy believed, that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Whatever happened to the party of John Kennedy? The party of Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Sam Nunn, Zell Miller and Bill Clinton?

Truman began the containment of the Soviet Union and integrated the armed forces by executive order, and did both without batting an eye to the right or the left.

Hubert Humphrey was a Cold War liberal who never apologized for hating communism. He saw the Democrat Party of Minnesota infested with Communists and formed the Democrat Farmer Labor Party which persists today. He never once apologized for America.

Sam Nunn ran the Senate Armed Services Committee like a man who understood that the Soviet nuclear arsenal needed to be dismantled regardless of who was in charge. He partnered with Republican Richard Lugar to actually work on it.

Zell Miller was the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia for 16 years. He was governor for 8 and then Senator. He was the keynote speaker at the Democrat Convention in 1992 and the Republican convention in 2004. He was a friend. I once asked him about changing parties and he said, John, I’m a Democrat through and through. Zell remains, in my view, the finest Georgia public servant of my lifetime.

And Bill Clinton — whatever I said about him thirty years ago, and I said plenty — stood in front of Congress in 1996 and told his own party, “The era of big government is over.” He signed a welfare reform bill and a balanced budget to prove he meant it.

I didn’t agree with these men on most things. But the debate was always inside a framework of a shared America. They believed in a strong military and a dangerous world. They believed work was better than a welfare check. They believed that Communism was an enemy, not a misunderstood alternative. We could fight about taxes and spending the way families fight about money, but inside the same house. And all of them – and all of us – were for secure borders.

In any one of the previous 12 off-year elections one side or the other would win and the debate would again be as to how big or how little to tax and spend. How big or little the government’s role in our lives should be. And we survived.

This election is different.

This past year, Democratic Socialists of America candidates won the New York City mayor’s race and then, months later, in primaries unseated sitting Democratic members of Congress. Adriano Espaillat, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a long time New York City political leader, was defeated by Darializa Avila Chevalier. No one saw it coming. Chevalier had founded a group whose stated aim was “the total eradication of western civilization.” Won’t it be interesting to see her take the oath to defend the Constitution.

In Colorado, 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros defeated thirty-year incumbent Diana DeGette. The Mayor of Seattle is a Democratic Socialist as well as the likely winners in November in Washington DC and Los Angeles. The mayor of New York City went on national television and said that a democratic socialist can win any office in America. He may be right.

We now have a radical Islamist leading in the race for the United States Senate in Michigan. His principal advisor is a man who believes that the US deserved 9-11 and that the US is worse than al Qaida in the world.

The analysts will tell you these wins so far are mostly in the bluest ground in America, and that winning a primary in Manhattan isn’t the same as winning a seat Republicans and Democrats both have to fight for. That’s a fair point. But the direction of the Democrat Party is clear. The energy, the money, the volunteers, and now the elected candidates are moving one way. That train has left the station and normal Democrats are racing to get on board.

Democrat Congressman Tom Suozzi from New York formed Promise to America to unite Democrats around four basic declarations.

We are capitalists not socialists. We want safety not lawlessness. We are mainstream not extreme. We are proud, not ashamed of America. Just 13 out of 212 members of the House signed on.

Analysts tell us that Democratic Socialists are not Communists. However, just before the Fourth of July, Ashik Siddique, co-chair of The Democratic Socialists of America appeared on The Will Cain Show. He said, “Our goal is Communism.” Over half of the Board of Directors of the Democratic Socialists of America self-identify as Communists. A recent poll concluded that 67% of Democrats prefer Socialism over Capitalism.

I live by a simple rule – when someone tells you who they are – believe them.

Just eight years ago Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated the Chairman of the Democratic Caucus for a seat in the US House of Representatives. She was the first recruit of the Democrat Socialists and was dismissed as a lightweight. Today she is in the top rank of Democrats for the presidential nomination in 2028. Other than bartending, this is her first job. She is 36 years old.

Before her ascension, Chuck Schumer was one of the adults in the room. He was for secure borders and a secure Israel. He now shrinks in her presence and she will take his senate seat if she doesn’t run for president. He is fully on board the train. Quaking at every stop, but on board.

Ten years ago, abortion remained the central organizing principle of the Democrat Party. Today it has to get in line behind support for Gaza, hate against Jews, mutilating children, boys in girls’ bathrooms, men having babies and punishment of success – and, of course, Communism. Everyone in the Party must get on board or get left behind.

This election is different.

And this election will have a direct impact on your life. When Joe Biden was elected, his first actions were to stop the building of the Keystone Pipeline and end the sale of oil leases. Oil, being a futures market, quickly spiked because the future did not look good. Everything you buy is brought to you by oil and the cost of living spiked.

The trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that passed in 2021 was largely a bill to fund green energy projects. Increasing regulations to deal with the climate change myth increased the cost of everything you buy also, including the cost of housing.

The border was opened up completely, the UN and other NGOs situated themselves in Panama organizing foreigners to come to the US. We gave hundreds of millions of dollars to them to help usher 15 to 20 million new people into our country costing local and state governments billions of dollars and increasing the crimes against American citizens. A working paper from the Fed concluded that 30% of the increase in the cost of new housing was caused by those immigrants.

Our Department of Justice not only spent three years and tens of millions of dollars trying to put Donald Trump in jail, they also indicted 72 others who either worked for him or aided his election. They also spied on Catholic churches, prosecuted pro-lifers, deployed the FBI against parents at school board meetings - and tapped the phones of their political enemies.

And when Donald Trump was elected, the Biden Administration spent the next 76 days before Trump’s inauguration shoveling money out the door to get it out of his reach.

$93 billion was given away by the energy department. According to Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, many of these late-stage loans were being directed toward companies that “had no clear business plan or path to financial viability.”

Not to be outdone, the EPA shoveled $20 billion out to a Citibank custodial account to be drawn down by 8 NGOs for green energy projects. One of the recipient NGOs, Power Forward Communities, was organized by Stacy Abrams just prior to the grant. She had $100 in its account.

The EPA modified the grant agreements right before the transition to legally strip the agency of its own oversight powers. The unique structure allowed the eight NGOs to withdraw the money out of the Citibank accounts without requiring any EPA approval or even having a serious plan.

Fortunately, Lee Zeldin caught the fraud, froze the money and is in the process of trying to recover it. They are, of course, suing him.

The world we are looking at today is radically different than the world we lived in just two years ago. Our borders are no longer even a point of discussion. Contact with illegals at our borders is down about 97% and over 3 million have been removed.

Our tax bill is permanent and relief for middle class Americans regarding tips, overtime and Social Security is secure.

The EPA rollback of the 2009 endangerment finding on global warming will save American taxpayers and manufacturers over $1.3 trillion in compliance costs, and lower the average cost of a new vehicle roughly $2,400. In addition, there are new lifelines for the oil, gas and coal industries and finally – that mud puddle that forms by the barn after every rain will no longer be considered a wetland that must be protected by the EPA.

Iran, for all the debate over the war, is no longer the imminent threat it has been for 47 years. Their nuclear capability has been neutralized. Their offensive capabilities no longer exist and Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are on their own. Seven presidents have watched while tens of thousands have been killed across the globe. That is over. They still, however, chant Death to America.

When someone tells you who they are – believe them.

And, of course, corruption: Hospice care, child care, adult care, unemployment compensation, organ and tissue transplants, autism care, Covid loans and student loans have all been found to be riddled with fraud. American taxpayers have even been funding a civil war in Somalia. Pure fraud has been estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Not a single Democrat has even spoken out about it. That is all coming to an end under the task force let by Vice President Vance.

And, most importantly, a world that has been moving inexorably toward a new world order for 70 years no longer is. The WTO is weak the WHO is neutered, the WEF is laughable, the UN is broke and the International Court has been told by Secretary Rubio that we just aren’t interested in playing, thank you very much. Nationhood is back.

Just as in the security of the border, all of this didn’t take another Congressional law, it just took another president. We are once again respected – and a little bit feared – in the world.

This election is different.

If the Democrats win this election and re-take the Congress, expect every issue we have corrected – the world, the border, the economy, regulations, taxes, green energy scams as well as child mutilation, boys in girls’ sports and punishment of success and, who knows, perhaps even rampant corruption, to return – with a vengeance.

Expect to see congressional investigations into conservatives and every conservative idea. And, of course, another impeachment or two.

Expect their most desired change in 2021, HR1, to return. It is a total re-write of election laws across the country.

We have been engaged in a knock-down drag-out battle over whether one has to be a citizen to vote in our elections and to have a photo ID to prove you are who you claim to be.

We are told by the Democrats and their propaganda arm, the Legacy Media, that election law is a matter for state legislatures. However, their HR1 totally subsumes the states’ role and eliminates voter ID, even in states that have passed it. It expands mail-in voting and ballot harvesting. It also provides for federal funding of campaigns. Every dollar raised by a candidate in amounts below $200 will receive a 6 to 1 match by the taxpayer. Food stamps for politicians!

In the 2024 election AOC would have qualified for a gift from you of more than 120 million dollars. You can do a lot of damage with 120 million dollars. In 2016 Bernie Sanders would have qualified for just under an additional billion dollars.

That did not pass in 2021 because 2 Democrat Senators refused to vote to eliminate the filibuster. Those two Senators are no longer there. Today, if they win, the filibuster will be gone on opening day and HR 1 will pass. We will also have statehood for Washington DC, Puerto Rico and Guam giving the Democrats six more senators.

The Supreme Court will be expanded to at least 13 members giving the Left a 7 to 6 majority immediately. Let us welcome 4 more Ketanji Brown Jacksons to the Court.

The media tell us, of course, that this is all speculation.

I repeat: When someone tells you who they are and what they intend to do – believe them.

Which brings me back to why I didn’t want to make this about one man. Presidents come and go. Policies last forever.

EVERYONE is angry today about our healthcare system. It is too costly, too distant and too out of control. It is the direct result of a policy decision taken by the Democrat Party when they had a huge majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate. The government decides what you must insure and who will provide it. The government will decide. Not you.

If you are a 59-year-old single woman seeking health insurance today you must pay to insure for hair transplants, HIV/Aids treatment, obstetrics and pediatric dentistry. Would you rather not insure for matters that don’t affect you? Your government knows best.

And more is coming. For many years what starts in California ultimately finds its way to Washington DC. Fifty years ago, it was the tax revolt and proposition 13. Today it is a series of proposals that are just revolting.

California has given us five examples just this year.

A young independent journalist named Nick Shirley went to California and filmed taxpayer-funded hospice and daycare corruption — the same kind of corruption he found in Minnesota and New York. The response from Sacramento wasn’t to investigate the fraud. It was to shut down investigations. The state will decide what is and is not corruption. Not you.

California now bars schools from requiring staff to tell a parent if their child asks to be treated as a different gender at school. Supporters say it protects kids in unsafe homes. The state will decide about your child’s needs. Not you.

California recently created the first state agency in America built to verify whether you descended from an enslaved person, as a qualifying test for state benefits in housing, education, and economic opportunity. The state will decide who was enslaved and who will benefit. Not you.

A new state law this year lets the state override local zoning and allow multi-story apartment buildings in neighborhoods zoned for single families. You may think that’s good housing policy. You may not. But the state will decide on your zoning. Not you.

California voters will decide this November on a one-time 5% tax on the assets of any resident worth over a billion dollars. You may think – a billionaire can afford it. But it will be coming to you soon.

The plan doesn’t just tax what you own — it presumes you own whatever you control. Google’s Sergey Brin owns about 5% of Alphabet stock, but his special shares give him voting control over a quarter of the company. Under the plan’s own language, that voting control — not his actual ownership — is what gets taxed. A quarter of a $4.2 trillion company, taxed at 5%, comes to $52.5 billion. To raise that in cash he’d have to sell over $80 billion in stock, about 60% of his holdings, pay tens of billions in federal and state capital gains tax on the sale itself, and crater the share price on the way out the door. Brin and his co-founder didn’t wait around to find out what might happen in the future. They left the state.

Today that line is drawn at a billion dollars. Nobody who has ever watched a tax threshold in this country believes it will stay there. And it’s coming. To a city near you.

Five examples. Five different subjects — journalism, your child, your history, your city, your money. One answer to all of them. They decide. Not you.

So let me tell you why “who decides” is not an abstraction to me. It is the story of my own life. I grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota near two Chippewa Indian reservations. The Indian children went to school with us. Every fifth-grade class I can recall had an Indian child at the top of the class. They were smart. They were artistic. They didn’t graduate. Teen age pregnancies, crime, alcohol, violence. There were no fathers in those homes.

For over a hundred years America gathered the Indians up onto reservations and bureaucrats told them where to go to school, which dentist and doctor to see, where to buy school clothes, and we paid the bill. Soon, the influence of the breadwinner was replaced by a bureaucrat with a government check and the breadwinner left.

I’m the only white man who ever played baseball with the Inger Indians. I was the catcher on that team and we had a pitcher named Richie Robinson. Richie had a curve ball that looked like it was coming at you from third base. He was offered a minor league contract that summer. He didn’t know if he should take it. I said, “Richie, you’re 26 years old and you’ve never had a job. They want to pay you to play baseball. Take the contract.”

Six weeks later he was back home. I asked him what happened. He said, “I just couldn’t make it. I didn’t know how to get an apartment so the owner had to help me. I kept getting confused about changing buses. I didn’t know if I should get a black and white or color T.V. I just couldn’t make all those decisions.”

At age 17 I realized that government decisions had stolen from them the ability to make decisions about their own lives.

Richie Robinson, Esica Ogema, David Cloud, Johnny Wakanabo, Tom Bowstring. They all died young. Not because government did too little. Because government did too much.

Having done so well with the American Indian we replicated the reservation in every major city in America with the very same results. Teen age pregnancies, crime, violence, drugs. No fathers in those homes. Not because government did too little. Because government did too much.

In spite of the total collapse of communism and socialism around the world, the Democratic Socialists of America honestly believe that more government will fix the problems that government has created. They don’t trust your decisions. They trust theirs.

They do not know – as we know – that the human being dreams – not for one more government program – but for freedom. The Soviet Union learned that in just 69 years.

Ilya Ehrenberg, a Russian poet, wrote, “If all the world were covered with asphalt, one day in that asphalt, a crack would appear. And in that crack – grass would grow.” That is the dream of the human spirit. That is the dream of freedom.

I refuse to say that this election is the most important election of our lifetimes. But this election is different.

If they win, the world will never be the same. And it won’t be just how or when you can get healthcare. This will be a new debate, not over how much or how little. This will be a debate over what. And they will decide what.

Bill Buckley founded the National Review in 1955. For the next 35 years, Buckley and his team, including for a time former Soviet spy and National Review senior editor Whittaker Chambers, were in fierce resistance against the threat of communism to the United States.

In 1954 Chambers had written a letter to Buckley laying out his view that the threat of communism was not from without, but from within. Chambers wrote, “It is idle to speak of saving Western Civilization because Western Civilization is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more than snatch a fingernail off a saint on the rack, or a handful of ashes from the faggots and bury them secretly, in a flowerpot, against that day ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there once was something else. That something else is thinkable and need some evidence of what it was and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”

I began this by saying that this is not about Donald Trump. This is about you. The future will come down to you and your neighbors and your friends. Are you the little platoons in the cities, in the towns, in the neighborhoods, who dare to believe that the tokens of hope and truth are worth saving? I think that you are. I think you will look at the choices beyond the personalities. I think you will conclude that this election is different and rally to turn out the communists among us and choose instead freedom. And my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will say thank you. As will I. Thank you.

In 1992 Bill Clinton ran for president promising that he would fix healthcare costs. After he was elected, he appointed his wife to remake our entire healthcare system. Remarkably, a top priority for her was that no one who had any first-hand experience in healthcare was allowed on the team. No doctors. No hospital personnel. No insurance personnel. In other words, no expertise.

Her proposal was just too complex and overwhelming. Senator Pat Moynihan famously said, “Anyone who thinks this can work in the real world, as presently written, isn’t living in it.” It died in a Democrat Senate when Leader George Mitchell decided it just couldn’t pass.

When President Obama was elected, he was blessed with 60 seats in the Senate so the Democrats could pass whatever they wanted to pass. He determined to succeed on healthcare where other Democrats failed since 1943 when the first bill was introduced by Congressman John Dingell from Michigan. He was the father of the John Dingell from Michigan who sponsored Obama’s bill and proudly sat beside the President as he signed the bill that was promised to bring “organization” to a healthcare system that was “chaotic.”

His solution was to prescribe exactly how to deliver healthcare in every way to every American. He wound up bureaucratizing it so heavily that it forced consolidation in hospitals and insurance companies because only the very big could survive. It also forced doctors out of their private offices and into the corporate world because the reporting and record keeping was just too much for a small operation to survive.

Obamacare was predicated on a minimum benefit that every insured had to be covered for. That minimum benefit was not in the bill, but language was included instructing the Department of Health and Human Services to define a minimum benefit plan. It did so within a couple of months after the bill was signed by the president. It should be pointed out here that the definition of the benefit package would have had to go through many departments and many meetings taking months if not years. That had already occurred and was simply waiting for passage to be inserted in the law. It was left out of the law so as to not warn people what was coming.

Irrespective of the famous promise “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” the minimum benefit would cause many people to lose their coverage and many companies to go out of business. Simply dropping the minimum benefit requirement would change everything. Today, if a couple retires at 60, they are too young for Medicare and must find private insurance for a few years. They will have to buy a new plan and pay for pediatric oral and vision care, maternity and newborn care, HIV – Aids and substance abuse coverage that they neither want nor need. (Some of the minimum benefits were more responsive to political needs than medical needs.) Dropping the minimum benefit would drop their costs dramatically.

For all of history, doctors have believed that the sooner you treat an issue the better. Covid was the first time where doctors told suffering patients to stay home and wait until you can’t breathe and then come in and we will try something. Doctors were instructed by their corporate employer, who took their lead from the government doctor, to wait. Government had a plan and it would involve vaccinations rather than treatment.

Since 2010, Obamacare has turned hospitals and health insurance companies, effectively, into government agencies. Doctors have become government employees.

Something has to change. How to fix it? Return to what worked.

There have been many proposals on the table from many sides. I suggest that returning to a couple of them could return us to the beautiful system of the past with some improvements to make it more accessible and less costly for all.

In 1993 Cliff Stearns introduced the Consumer Choice Health Security Act as part of the healthcare debate. It was sponsored by Don Nickles in the Senate. It would allow anyone and everyone to buy into the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan. The FEHBP has been gutted by Obamacare, but would be very easy to recreate what existed in 2009 before it was destroyed.

The FEHBP was a cafeteria plan that provided for catastrophic coverage, HMOs, PPOs and HSAs etc. You choose. The government provided subsidies, but the typical cost for a congressman was between $250 and $400 per month. It was provided by private insurers, crossed state lines and provided a pool large enough to spread risk over millions, enabling it to include those with pre-existing conditions without penalties. There was no minimum benefit requirement and users were allowed to choose their coverage.

If we open up the FEHBP to all, the pool will be in the tens of millions. We should expect new companies to enter the competition, undercutting the costs of the big bureaucratic corporations that were created by Obamacare. It will be a market too big and too lucrative to ignore.

We should repeal Obamacare on a date certain. Recreate the FEHBP and produce a simple readable bill that will open it up to all. Individuals seeking help in today’s market will be saved! Small businesses and professional corporations have been hamstrung for decades trying to find affordable insurance for their team. They will be thrilled to join and even major corporations may find it suits their needs. But – this is important! – their employees will be insured as individuals for whom they may contribute to cover the premium just as government covers part of the cost for its employees. It will create a huge pool that will be universally portable. No one would ever lose their insurance. Indeed, it may be the future for Medicare, Medicaid and even the VA.

For some, the costs of premiums will be more than they can afford. Rather than subsidies, use Community Health Centers. There are more than 9,000 Community Health Centers in the United States. In 1993 Roy Rowland and Mike Bilirakis had a bill to expand funding for CHCs between the state and federal governments. There will likely be many urgent care centers currently owned by Big Health that could be converted into CHCs “down the street.” Let any person in the country, for any reason whatever, walk into a Community Health Center and be treated. We may choose to require a co-pay and, other than that, no paperwork at all. If rich people want to use a CHC good for them.

Some will not participate. That’s just the way it is. If we repealed the 1986 law that mandates emergency room care for all, more would buy insurance.

Tort reform in the form of loser pays should be added. Loser pays does not need to be explained and it finds fewer opponents than limits on awards. Additionally, those most grievously and carelessly injured should not be limited in their recovery. The vast majority of malpractice claims that go to trial are won by the doctor. Loser pays would reduce lawsuits. The market would bring some sanity to defensive medicine costs. The Democrats, of course, will fight for the trial lawyers.

The United States Public Health Plan should be governed by private people appointed by the president. This is a quick and doable deal. I think the president should jump on this idea and it would be tough for anyone to vote against.

It will treat every American exactly equally. Eliminating the minimum benefit and allowing people to pick and choose what they wish to insure will drive down costs. Reducing lawsuits will lower defensive medicine costs as well as the cost of malpractice insurance. It will free up doctors to practice medicine again and it will energize competition, capitalism and freedom.

Put Congress on the plan and then give America a plan – not only as good as Congress – but the same as Congress.

I have said for a long time that the proximate cause of the collapse of freedom the United States is the press, the only industry that has specific protection under the Constitution of the United States. Freedom depends on a skeptical press, willing to expose all of the wrongs regardless of where they are found. Our entire media industry has failed us.

Ellison’s remake of CBS under Bari Weiss changed the leadership, but it didn’t change the result. Bari’s choice of Tony Dokoupil to resurrect the dismal ratings of the one-vaunted CBS Evening News has now reached the lowest ratings of the 21^st Century. The total audience is now below 4 million total viewers.

I have some advice for David. You cannot change the result by changing the people at the top. The rot is deep.

Twenty years ago, Bernie Goldberg, a former CBS News reporter, wrote Bias. It was a take-down of CBS News due to its insular look at the world. He said that everyone in the CBS News Division in New York believed in their heart of hearts that their political views were precisely in the mainstream because everyone they knew agreed with them. And, indeed, that is the problem.

I have concluded that the real force behind the power of television is not the person who reads the news. It is the person who writes what that person reads. If I were going to try to improve the ratings I would start with the producers.

For decades 60 Minutes was one of the most important programs on television. The animating force behind the program was the producer, Don Hewitt. He chose the subjects and how they would be covered. He oversaw the scripts. He was a “newsman!”

In Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner and Morely Safer he had serious people, news people, doing the interviews and running the stories.

In 2004 viewership had declined from 17 million viewers to about 14 million and Hewitt was moved out. Politics overtook 60 Minutes just as it overtook the newsroom. Over time, the selection of subjects became very one-sided.

They also replaced the serious on-air personalities with dilettantes. Anderson Cooper? Norah O’Donnell? Sharyn Alfonsi? Spare me. They now have just over 8 million viewers. Joe Rogan routinely does better than that.

The news we get from the corporate media today does not diverge from the approved narrative of the Left.

It is now estimated that pure, unadulterated corruption is responsible for the cost to taxpayers of between 500 billion and one trillion dollars - PER YEAR!

It took Nick Shirley, an unpaid 23-year-old with a YouTube channel, an X account, and a video camera to uncover the fraud. This fraud, both in Minnesota and California, was reported to the top governmental leadership years ago. Yes, even Joe Biden was informed about California’s hospice fraud 4 years ago. Nothing was done. NOTHING! It was the Vice President’s home state. So … what’s a few billion bucks among friends?

We are going to find the same fraud in virtually every state. And we’re going to have to wait for more young unpaid producers with video cameras to root it out. The corporate media has no interest in it. It goes against the narrative.

Americans are not getting turned off by news. They are getting turned off by lies. Hundreds of podcasts, hours-long, get millions of viewers and listeners. People want to know more. But they want authenticity. They are tired of the lies.

And the lies being told to us are not even believed by those telling them. No sentient human being believes that men can have babies or that gender is a choice. They do, however, insist that we believe it.

Hannah Arendt addressed this in Truth and Politics. In her view the lying was not aimed at making anyone believe a lie, but to ensure that no one believes anything anymore. A people that cannot distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, are being completely subjected to the rule of lies. And then they are helpless.

The corporate media industry has fallen victim to the narrative. They picked a team. And they lie for the team. To end the lies, to report the news, you must destroy the entire structure.

If I were David Ellison, I would hire another top person to work with Bari, the Editor-in-Chief. That person would be the Producer-in-wChief. I would find someone outside of the system who was curious and cynical. Someone like Matt Taibbi who questions everyone and everything, but who is a very talented reporter and knows news. (Substack: Racket News)

I would turn that producer loose to remove the rot throughout the system. There are now thousands of young men and women who have created their own “productions.” They are getting more viewers and listeners than the networks. All by themselves! Turn them loose.

If Ellison turned someone like Taibbi loose and allowed him to clean out the newsroom and fill it with young aggressive people they would change the atmosphere in that newsroom. Everyone would want to join in the fun. And we would watch the evening news again. But not until then.

I spent 18 years as a Member of Congress looking west from Washington DC and telling my constituents how the world worked. When I retired, I moved back to middle America and saw how wrong I was. The world looks entirely different looking east.

Today the news is all about President Elect Trump’s appointments. His statement that Mike Pompeo and Nicki Haley will not be a part of the new team has created huge anxiety among the Washington DC establishment.  

Mr. Trump received 45 phone calls from establishment people urging him to appoint Pompeo again as Secretary of State. He ignored them. He is consulting instead with people he trusts including his son, Don Jr., Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. 

How dare he?

Those three look at life differently. They think that the US has involved itself in wars where it is not in our national interest to do so. Does this mean that he will remove the US from its influence in world affairs? Hardly. 

Mr. Trump has been on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling them it’s time to get their stuff together. He reportedly said to Putin, “Be careful. I have weapons too.”

Qatar has instructed the Hamas leadership, which sits comfortably in lavish splendor in Qatar while Palestinians die, to clear out! Qatar wants out of Palestine’s problems. Hamas leaders in Gaza, in the meantime, have publicly proclaimed their interest in a settlement.

The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has indicated that the European Union will be buying more Liquified Natural Gas from the US rather than Russia. Russia will sell oil in US dollars after all. China has stated its intention of working for a more peaceful world.

The world appears not to be responding to a shrinking violet. 

Mr. Trump knows, better than most, that all wisdom does not reside in Washington DC. They helped to populate his last administration. Many people he hired did their best to undermine his decisions. He is looking elsewhere.

John Rich has called Trump the Blue-Collar Billionaire. Mr. Trump routinely talked to the ordinary working men and women on his many construction projects to find out what was really going on.

There is a story about Trump calling into the Oval Office some enlisted folks to get their perspective on things. The generals were furious. They had been in DC far too long to let mere sergeants talk to the president. 

(Sergeants could tell you that an 8,000 % markup for a soap dispenser for the C-17 cargo plane was a bit much. Generals are too important to think about soap dispensers.)

Don Jr’s main hobby is hunting. His hunting buddies are ordinary guys who hang out together and BS with each other over a beer. For all of his businesses and travel I suspect that Elon Musk spends much more time on projects with the doers than with the planners. Tucker spends more time in Maine with his neighbors than with the glitterati. The folks they talk with are ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. They do not look to government for solutions to their problems. They just want to be left alone. And they see the world differently with respect to world affairs. It is their sons, after all, who go to war.

Most of what we are told about the world comes from the political and media class feeding on each other and looking out across America from west to east.

As I said in the beginning, I spent 18 years in Washington telling my constituents how the world worked looking west. I am now convinced that I should have been listening to my constituents tell me how the world worked looking east.

Perhaps it’s time for the folks looking east to populate an administration with people like themselves. It is not possible to do worse.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is a direct result of your success in disrupting the established order. The single most powerful way to finish that job on the DC Establishment is to destroy its ability to reward and punish with the tax code. The FairTax does that!

The IRS was weaponized early in the Obama Administration, and no one ever paid a price. IRS emails were destroyed. Lois Lerner was found in contempt of Congress, and the issue just went away. The recent doubling of the IRS budget is an effort to make it the primary weapon against middle-class America.

History has shown us that once Democrats get another big spending program passed, Republicans never get it removed. Republicans have a sad history of accepting Democrat programs and only trying to reduce the cost. Let me give you an example of Republican failure. Immediately after the passage of Obamacare, Steve King placed at the desk a motion to discharge a bill to repeal Obamacare. If we got 218 signatures, the bill would go directly to the floor for a vote. I agreed and signed it. Our leaders urged Republicans not to sign it. They said that a lot of our constituents liked the provision that allows our children, up to the age of 26, to stay on our policies and we don’t want to anger them. That is why we fail. We cave.

The establishment fears you because they believe you will destroy what “is working.” (For them!) That disruption must be completed. The most final and complete disruption of the establishment and the deep state would be accomplished by passing the FairTax and abolishing the IRS. It has been estimated that more than half of K Street makes its living gaming the tax code. Get rid of the tax code, and half of K Street goes away!

Let me give you two examples that may not spring to mind. The realtors in my district loved the FairTax because, with no income taxes, the huge increase in take-home pay would make it easier to pay the mortgage. The National Association of Realtors hates the FairTax because they were organized to protect the mortgage interest deduction. If we eliminate the income tax and there is no deduction, what are they to do? The same can be said for the Farm Bureau. Their 5 million family members LOVE the FairTax because it eliminates the death tax. Their bureaucrats are not so sure. They were organized to get rid of the death tax, and if we do that what are they to do? That same argument obtains from one end of K Street to the other. AICPA, Retail Federation, and all across Washington DC.

We know that bold action is necessary to rebuild our economy and bring jobs back to the United States. The FairTax does that and more.

What else will happen?

1. The economy will explode. Trillions of dollars offshore will be repatriated because there will be no tax event in doing so. I once asked Allan Greenspan how long it would take for that money to be in our markets and banks if we passed the FairTax. He said, “Months.” A study shows that capital spending in the first year after passing the FairTax will increase 70%. That increases productivity and it is estimated that the GDP will grow in the first year by 10%. That begins to save Social Security and Medicare. Additionally, the ceiling on contributions to those programs disappears, and we include illegal immigrants and the underground economy.

2. Manufacturing will return to the US. Former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer often quoted an informal study of a large number of international businesses that are headquartered overseas. When asked what they would do in their long-term planning if we eliminated all taxes on capital and labor and taxed only personal consumption, 80% said they would build their next plant in the US. 20% said they would relocate their headquarters to the US. I discussed this with GW Bush in the Oval Office, and he grasped it immediately. And it is totally border-neutral which will improve our exports as well as make us more competitive with imports whose taxes have been rebated.

3. With the prebate, the poor will be totally untaxed, and consumer prices will fall dramatically. A Harvard study determined that the embedded cost of the IRS at retail is 22% of the price. (Example: It takes hundreds of companies to bring a loaf of bread to your table. Oil companies get oil, and refineries refine it for the tractors and trucks. Ore companies get ore to sell to steel companies to sell to tractor and truck manufacturers who sell them to distributors. Farmers and grain companies and bakeries and plastic companies and distribution companies and retail stores are involved. Each of them has labor costs and operating costs and rent and TAX costs. The only mechanism available for any business to pay a bill is price. And the only taxpayer in the world is the consumer who consumes the product and all of the embedded costs.) Let’s quit lying to the public. Stop pretending that businesses pay taxes and tax the consumer honestly and openly. The prebate only goes to legal residents.

4. We will, for the first time ever, tax wealth instead of wages. (For those worried that the rich won’t pay their fair share I note that all wealth is ultimately consumed. If not by the earner, then by the heirs. Even money contributed to charities is ultimately consumed and will be taxed.) And if Elon wants to move to a farm and grow his groceries and never pay taxes we won’t care. We will borrow his money and create jobs with it.

5. Businesses will make business decisions based on what is best for their shareholders, employees, and customers, not what is best for their tax burden.

6. We will tax the underground economy which, 15 years ago, was estimated at 3 trillion dollars a year. Illegal immigrants will also pay their fair share.

7. We will save Americans nearly $1 trillion spent each year on IRS paperwork.

8. Churches will be able to conduct themselves as they see fit without IRS agents listening to their sermons. The Johnson Amendment will no longer mean anything.

9. And we will give the American people the greatest gift it is within our power to give. Anonymity. No government agency should know more about us than we are willing to tell our children.

In 2009, a poll concluded that, given a description of taxing income or consumption, the sales tax wins. In 2012, a study was done that concluded that if we were on the FairTax instead of the income tax during the financial crisis we would have collected 10% more in revenue.

If you begin to talk about the FairTax, you will energize millions of people who have been begging for the opportunity to support someone who supports the FairTax. All Republican candidates would have to get in line.

This is not a crazy idea. It has been carefully studied and it works. It is exactly the system in place in Monaco, for example. For all of the wailing from the Left about billionaires paying their “fair share,” this will make that happen. It is a fact that most billionaires pay a lower tax RATE than the average taxpayer. They have tax experts and lower their tax costs legally and fairly. But they spend more than most too, and they will pay more than the rest.

You will be told that the FairTax will discourage charitable giving. My parents never earned above the poverty line their entire lives, and yet my mother found a way to contribute to the church every week. She wasn’t concerned about deductions.

Neither were those who gave to real charity. The Fricks, the Mellons, and the Carnegies gave away their fortunes before there even was an income tax to deduct from, and they built schools and hospitals and libraries. Most of the recent large commitments to charity by today’s billionaires have been to set up personal foundations. Those foundations serve more as political organizations and tax-free public relations operations than solving the needs of the less fortunate. For example, the Gates' Foundation pushed hard for vaccinations across the world for years while Bill Gates is a major owner of vaccine companies. While Gates has become the largest owner of farmland in the country, his foundation is pushing a plant-based diet to solve global warming. There is very little real charity in these recent charitable foundations.

REAL charity is found in the FairTax. You will be told that this is very hard on the poor, but they are totally untaxed. We send a cash advance every month – the prebate - to every family, based on the size of the family, (Yes, you and Melania and Baron will get one.) It is to totally offset the tax cost of spending on necessities. That is defined each year by the government as poverty level spending. The following shows how much each family will receive this year.

Beyond that, we are all voluntary spenders and will be taxed the same. And there is no tax on used items.

The FairTax percentage rate is set as an “inclusive” tax, and the rate is 23% on the personal consumption of all new goods and services. That is to say it is included in the price as a percent of your spending. We chose to use an inclusive tax because we are replacing an inclusive income tax. Your income tax is included as a percent of your income.

Opponents will argue that it is a 30% tax when compared with a state sales tax which is on top of your spending or an exclusive tax. So, let’s compare it with the income tax when figured the same way. The FairTax is 30% on top of what you have to spend. The average income tax, of those who pay income tax, is 14.6% plus the payroll tax of 7.65%, or 22.25%. If you earn $100 you keep $77.75 to spend. That equals a tax on top of what you have left to spend of 29.6%. In other words, the burden is about the same, but with the FairTax, we get dramatically more purchasing power with lower prices, more take-home pay, and the prebate plus no IRS in our lives.

Opponents have also argued that the rate would have to be significantly higher than 23%. They presume the bill will not pass as written. They “assume” Congress will exempt items they would like to see exempted and – voila! – a higher rate is needed. We will argue that exempting anything will open the door to a tax code as complicated as the current one. Indeed, we should require a supermajority to exempt anything.

As to the politics of the bill, in my primary race in 2002 my view was that if the turnout was a record low – say 30,000 votes – I could lose. The average turnout in a primary in those precincts that comprised the new 7th district was 37,000 votes. The record number of votes was 41,700. On Election Day we had 88,500 voters, and I won by 30 points. We did a poll two days later to find out why so many voted. One fourth of the voters had never voted in a Republican primary before. They came to save the FairTax. 4% were Dems and they came for the same reason. I never ran a commercial on the issue. It is a winner.

In about September of 2004, the Democrats got nervous about the issue and Leader Nancy Pelosi and Budget Leader John Spratt had a one-hour press conference trashing the FairTax. A month later Roll Call did a 1500-word piece on the bill. They used all of the Democrat talking points against the bill and never called me, the author of the bill, for a comment. The last sentence of that story was a quote by a senior Democrat leadership aide who said, “If the American people catch on to how simple and fair this is we’re toast.”

Mr. President, this is a big idea. It is also simple and fair. This could change the world. I am available for a meeting with you or your economic advisors. Let’s end the deep state and change the world in just one bill.

My best,

John Linder (GA 7 – Retired)

While there is increased discussion about the Fairtax in the political world these days there is also a growing interest in killing it. For those who are not familiar with the Fairtax let me give you a brief explanation.

Currently we pay taxes based on our income. We pay a graduated income tax based on the amount we earn. We pay a payroll tax to cover Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security Disability payments. We also pay a tax on the gain in value of any assets we sell and also on what we have left to pass on to our heirs when we die.

(That death tax is mean. I once spoke against it on the floor of the House of Representatives. I said that there was a time in some parts of the country when hard guys ruled certain areas of the city and demanded a monthly retainer to allow you to stay in business. But even the Mafia didn’t show up at the widow’s door when you died demanding their share of what was left. That cannot be said for the government.)

The Fairtax would end all of those taxes based on income and tax only the purchase of new goods or services. A nationwide sales tax. The average income earner currently pays between 30 and 40% of what they earn when you add in the payroll tax. Under the Fairtax you would pay 23% of what you spend. There would be no tax on any business transaction.

One of the first lessons we learned nearly 30 years ago when doing the research was that America clearly wanted to protect the poor so we provide a cash advance to every household, based on the size of the household, that would cover the tax costs of spending up to poverty level spending. Yes, Bill Gates and Elon Musk would receive this also and this is important. We are not going to know who is rich and who is poor.

Today that would allow a family of four to spend about $39,940 with no tax consequence.

Now let’s get down to the reason why it will be dead on arrival in Washington DC. That is – unless you join in this fight.

Washington DC used to be about Democrats versus Republicans, then Liberals versus Conservatives.  Now it is a simple as the insiders versus the rest of us. The insiders in DC are former Representatives, former Senators and former senior committee staffers or agency leaders who left important decision-making roles in government to make a fortune as lobbyists shaping future decision-making. And more than half of them make their living gaming the tax code.

A few examples: The single biggest concern of every farmer in America is what will happen when he and his wife die. Will there be anything left for the children after taxes? Most of them borrow money every year to get their crop in the ground. They live modestly but spend huge amounts of money with accountants and lawyers trying to protect what they have accumulated for their children. They say a prayer every night that the Lord will find a way to get rid of the death tax.

They even formed a powerful organization in Washington DC. The American Farm Bureau Federation has 5 million farm families that pay dues to fund hundreds if not thousands of former congressional staffers to administer their organization. Their website talks about food security and hunger and agriculture budgets, but what they were organized for was to get rid of the death tax.

When I was in Congress I spoke to groups of people about the Fairtax in over 30 states. I spoke to state Farm Bureau members in most of those states. They were all for the Fairtax. One year at their annual meeting the leaders were planning to pass a resolution in support of the Fairtax. The bureaucrats who ran their organization said, “Hold on. We need to study this a bit more.” They didn’t tell their elected farm leaders what they really meant. If we pass the Fairtax and eliminate the death tax what are they to do?

Real estate agents came through my office from my district every year. They loved the Fairtax. The huge increase in take-home pay for every worker in America means they can afford a bigger house payment. Of course, many agents get out their calculators and calculate your savings from the mortgage interest deduction, but 75% of us don’t itemize and thus don’t benefit.

Realtors also organized to protect that deduction. The National Association of Realtors has 1.5 million dues-paying members. They have built their own building near the capitol to house their thousands of employees.

While the agents who pay the salaries of the bureaucrats that run their organization overwhelmingly support the Fairtax the bureaucrats say, “Hold on. We need to study this a bit more.”

They were originally formed to protect the mortgage interest deduction and if we pass the Fairtax and eliminate its need what are they to do? They are so serious about their opposition that they spent $100,000 of their members’ money to defeat me in an election in 2002. They failed.

Now some of the insiders are paying formerly important people to study the Fairtax. The money for the study comes from the insiders so we know that the result will be exactly what they want. The one that I saw this morning came from an organization whose president is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office with whom I had a very cordial relationship. The opening charge was that the 23% number of the tax was a bit optimistic. It could, with all the avoidance and cheating anticipated, go as high as 380%. Really?

It's getting harder and harder to take Washington DC seriously.

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Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised a vote on the FairTax. Immediately some have called instead for the vote to be on the Flat Tax.

This debate has been going on for over 30 years now as to whether the current confusing tax code should be replaced with a flat tax on income or a tax on consumption. Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.) wrote a book about the Flat Tax in the early 90s and Steve Forbes ran for president on it in 2000. I too once supported the Flat Tax. But I came to realize that a tax on business could not be a Flat tax on revenue, we could only tax profits and not sales.

We could not tax sales because while the gross margin for software may be over 50 percent, the gross margin for groceries is less than 3 percent. We would still require a huge federal agency to audit how you arrive at taxable profit from gross sales. That would then become subject to “refinement” from future congresses. I concluded early on that the only reform of the tax code that will be lasting is to repeal it. I introduced the FairTax.

The tax we have today—that you have come to know and love—is a flat tax on income…110 years later. It was flattened out again in 1986 only to have been amended tens of thousands of times since then. It can be flattened every year, but we will still need a huge federal agency to audit how you arrive at taxable income from gross sales.

As long as Congress knows how much you make and how you make it, they are going to find a way to get the rest. Under the FairTax no one will know any details about your earnings.

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University estimated 10 years ago the hidden economic costs of complying with the code and record keeping was about $500 billion each year. Today it is close to twice that. An earlier study concluded that it costs a typical small business $724 to collect, comply, and remit $100. That is not just inefficient: That is stupid!

Our tax code has created an underground economy of $3 trillion per year and keeps in excess of about $32 trillion in offshore financial centers.

This money wants to be in our economy, but is offshore because of the tax consequences of repatriation. I once asked Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan how long it would take for that offshore money to be returned to our markets and banks if we passed the FairTax. He said months. Why do we not want that money in our markets or banks?

Today upwards of 20 percent of what you currently spend at retail represents the embedded cost of the IRS. You are paying the income tax costs and the payroll tax costs and the accountants and the attorneys to avoid the tax costs of each of the thousands of companies it takes to get a loaf of bread to your table. From getting oil out of the ground to make fuel to getting ore out of the ground to make steel. 

All of those businesses have labor costs and rend costs and travel costs and tax costs. The only mechanism available for any business to pay any of its expenses is through price and all of those costs end up in the price system. Those additional tax costs in our price system make us less than competitive in a global economy and drive jobs offshore.

These four problems: 1. Offshore money; 2. Costs of Compliance; 3. Underground economy; and 4. Embedded tax costs in the price system - all remain in place when we nibble around the edges of the current code. All go away by abolishing the code and taxing consumption rather than taxing income.

The FairTax is a retail sales tax levied at the checkout counter on the purchase of new goods and services for personal use. There is no tax on used goods, since nothing should be taxed more than once.

There is no tax on business activity. There is no tax on personal income, corporate income, dividends and estates. There is no gift tax or capital gains tax.  All gone—along with the IRS.

Currently the top 50 percent of income earners pay 97 percent of all income taxes. Their income tax averages 14.6 percent plus 15.3 percent for the payroll tax. Thus, the government takes 29.9% of everything you earn.  Under the FairTax you would give the government 23 percent of every dollar you spend.  If you don’t spend it, you are not taxed on it.

By eliminating the IRS, we will share a $5 to $10 trillion, 10-year benefit by getting rid of the compliance costs. Prices will decline because the embedded costs are gone. Take home pay will increase since there would be no deductions from the paycheck. Those two events will create a huge increase in purchasing power

We will become a global powerhouse by selling into a global economy with no tax component in our price system.

So that no one should have to pay taxes on necessities we devised a prebate system, a rebate in advance, which would transfer to every household a distribution sufficient to totally untax them on necessities, based not on income but on the size of the household.

The prebate for a family of four would be sufficient to allow that family to spend $39,400 with no tax consequence. Since the poor spend virtually all of their money on necessities, this will provide nearly complete relief from taxation for them.

Beyond that we are all voluntary spenders and we will all be voluntary taxpayers. We will pay taxes when we choose, as much as we choose, by how we choose to spend.

The FairTax bill anticipates the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment. The bill says that if we haven’t repealed the Sixteenth Amendment after seven years under the FairTax system, the FairTax is repealed. Congress will have to decide whether they want to vote to return to the system that has proven to be so corrupt or repeal the 16th amendment. We believe that the American people will put enough pressure on Congress to get them to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.

The United States will turn to the FairTax one day. Not because Congress will be struck by the wisdom of it, but out of the realization that there is no place else to go. Every tax increase in the last 60 years has been sold to the American people as only impacting the top 2 percent. The rest of America said, “Go get ‘em.” Those folks can afford to live elsewhere. And there just isn’t enough revenue in the top 2 percent to meet all of our needs.

The FairTax untaxes necessities, broadens the base and lowers the tax rate. Everybody is treated exactly the same. Under the fair tax when Warren Buffett’s wealth is spent—and it will be spent, if not by him, then by his heirs or by foundations—it will be taxed at exactly the same rate as his secretary’s rate and he will be proud.

The Fairtax is back on the front burner of the Congress! Thanks to the hard work of the Freedom Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives the Speaker has said that the Fairtax will get a vote in committee.

This, of course, has moved the Democrats quickly to the front of the news cycle declaring that a “new 30% tax on gasoline, groceries and medicine” will be a tragedy for the poor.

This trope has been around for as long as the Fairtax bill has. I first introduced the bill in July of 1999. Neal Boortz and I, with Rob Woodall’s help, wrote two books responding to these arguments, but the tropes remain. And we will respond again.

One of the things we learned after commissioning many studies is that there is a significant part of the price system that is represented by the embedded cost of the IRS. More heavily manufactured products, like automobiles, may have to increase their selling prices by more than 20% because of embedded tax costs. Other products that do not go through so many manufacturing steps, may only have increases of 10% to 15%. 

A company has no way to pay any of its bills other than the price system and the person who buys a product or service and uses it personally pays the labor, rent, heating, cooling, distribution and, yes, tax costs of every company it took to get that product to the cash register.

Think about a loaf of bread. There is an oil company that gets oil out of the ground to make gasoline or diesel, an ore company that gets the ore to sell to a steel company to make steel to sell to a manufacturer to make trucks and tractors and rubber companies that sell to tire companies. Seed companies, farmers, bakeries, distribution companies and grocery stores, plus many more, are all involved in getting that loaf of bread to you. All have tax costs and you pay them when you buy and consume the bread.

In fact, the only taxpayer in the world is the consumer who consumes the product or service and cannot pass on the costs. Let us just be honest and levy the tax at that point. All of the current complications are to pretend that someone else is paying the bill.

The Fairtax eliminates the IRS and the embedded costs get driven out of the price system giving everyone more purchasing power.

Additionally, the Fairtax gives an advance to every household, based on the size of the household, to totally offset the cost of the Fairtax up to poverty level spending. That is defined as the amount of spending needed for that family to buy their necessities. Today that number for a family of four is about $39,440.00. Those living at or near the poverty level will be totally untaxed.

How much is the tax? It is 23% of what you spend. Now the opponents call it a 30% tax. Let us deal with that confusion. I use that word advisedly. They are trying to confuse you.

There are two ways to treat a tax as to its impact on your personal costs. The income tax you currently pay is called an inclusive tax because the tax is included in your promised pay. If you have a salary of $50,000 per year the tax is included in that amount and taken out before you see what you have left.

State sales taxes are treated as exclusive taxes. They are on top of the cost of the good or service you buy. If the hammer costs $10.00 and your state and local sales taxes are 10% then you will pay $11.00.

There was a significant debate among the original founders of the Fairtax whether to treat it as an exclusive tax such as state sales taxes are treated, or to treat it as an inclusive tax like the income tax. We chose to express the tax in the same way as the tax we are replacing is expressed.

The opponents quickly jumped to the worst case - 30% on top of what you spend. Then it is fair to ask them to tell us what the cost of the income tax is when treated the same way. In other words, what percent of your income goes to the government on top of what you have left to spend?

The Tax Foundation concludes that the average tax rate is 14.6% for the top 50% of taxpayers who pay 97% of all taxes, and 3.4% for the bottom 50%. The average tax rate overall is 13.3%. Additionally, all income earners pay 15.3% of their earnings in payroll taxes. While half of that amount is remitted by the company one works for virtually every economist considers it part of the employee’s earnings and thus the employee’s cost.

Treating the income tax exclusively, just as the opponents insist on treating the Fairtax, the average of those paying 97% of all taxes is: 14.6+15.3 divided by 70.1 = 42.7%.   The average of all, including the bottom 50% which collectively pay about 3% of all taxes, is: 13.3+15.3 divided by 71.4 = 40.1%

So, comparing both taxes as the cost of the government above cash available we get 30% for the Fairtax and over 40% for the income tax. You decide which you would rather pay.

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