William Ockham was a 14th century philosopher and is best known for the principle of Occam’s Razor which translates to “enti-ties must not be multiplied beyond necessity”.
To paraphrase “when a problem has more than one solution, the simplest, least complicated solution is preferred”. So which solu-tion would Willam Ockham prefer – the income tax or the FAIRtax?
At the risk of stating the obvious, HR 25 (the FAIRtax bill) is approximately 130 pages long. It replaces a system that has spawned oer 80,000 pages of tax law, regulations and case law.
The FAIRtax was designed by a small team of economists working together to devise the best tax system possible. The Internal Rev-enue Code is a hopelessly complicated patchwork of competing and conflicting provisions cobbled together by wrangling between the two political parties that has been going on since 1913.
The FAIRtax is a simple, fair, efficient and transparent retail consumption tax. It replaces the personal income tax, the corporate in-come tax, capital gains taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes and the horribly regressive federal payroll taxes.
The income tax requires that American taxpayers spend countless hours filling out complicated forms every year telling the govern-ment all the intimate details of their personal finances. The FAIRtax requires no paperwork at all from individuals.
The income tax is so complicated that when 50 professional tax preparers were given the exact same data for a typical American fami-ly, they came up with 49 different answers on what that family owed in taxes. The FAIRtax is so simple a fifth grader can understand it.
The income tax requires thousands of pages on how to fill out all the various IRS tax forms. The FAIRtax has no forms and re-quires no instructions at all.
The income tax is riddled with a myriad of deductions, credits, adjustments, exemptions and loopholes so that two families with similar incomes can owe vastly different amounts of tax. The FAIRtax treats everyone the same.
No one pays the FAIRtax on their basic necessities. Beyond that, the more you spend on new goods and services, the more tax you pay.
When compared with the income tax, the FAIRtax delivers a resounding simple solution to our ongoing complex problem of an impossible tax code with annual illegal tax evasion of $1 trillion. The FAIRtax is simply a better mechanism to collect our nation’s treasury receipts. I think it’s quite clear that William Ockham would choose the FAIRtax over the income tax, wouldn’t you?For more information please go to FAIRtax.org
