Letter: FairTax proposal is being misrepresented

I find it sad that I have come to expect the misrepresentation of facts by those who are seeking to be leaders in our nation, but the outright lies from Michael Bennet, John Salazar, and various PACs that you can’t even contact have gone just too far for me. This is not necessarily a defense of Ken Buck or Scott Tipton, but I wish to expose the lies about the FairTax. They are claiming Buck and Tipton support a 23 percent tax increase, which they do. However, they fail to tell you two important things, thus leaving you with the impression that everything will cost you more, which is the exact opposite of the truth.
1. They have chosen not to say in their ads that there will be the removal of 22 percent embedded taxes that you already pay on items you purchase. Let me do the math for the “rancher/farmer Mr. Salazar” who can’t seem to do math as well as the “multi-millionaire Scott Tipton” who can. Here John and Mike, 23 minus 22 = 1. So in truth you will pay 1 percent more at the register.
2. I don’t wish to pay another 1 percent any more than you do, so let me bring up the second point they fail to mention. If the FairTax were passed, 85,000 pages of tax code would become obsolete, the IRS would cease to exist, and April 15 would become just another day on the calendar because you would no longer pay any federal income tax. Here is what that would mean. If you earn $15 per hour, you make $600 per week, but your take-home pay is probably somewhere around $450. Under the FairTax, your take-home pay would be the full $600. Looks as though we can now afford that extra 1 percent at the register on things we buy. Corporations would no longer view the United States as having some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world (P.S., corporations don’t pay taxes, they are a cost of doing business, which is passed on to you and me, the consumer) to the only nation in the world with no corporate taxes. I can only imagine how that would serve to bring businesses back to America, anybody need a job? They also say you would lose the tax deduction for interest on your mortgage. Yes, you would, but that is because you no longer pay any income tax, there is nothing to deduct from, you keep your full paycheck.
What politicians hate the most about the FairTax is it would be the largest transfer of power since the founding of our nation. The government would lose its power to control you through taxation. This is perhaps an over-simplification of the FairTax, but it really isn’t a very complicated system. M.I.T. formulated the numbers to fund our government through a national consumption tax, provide relief for the poor through a pre-bate, and make our nation competitive again. I urge you to take a few minutes and go to www.fairtax.org and plug in the numbers from your household and see what happens to your spendable income under the FairTax, or come and talk to me about it, I’ll even help you get a copy of the book explaining the FairTax or one that addresses and shoots down objections to it as well as its advantages over a flat tax. And after rereading this I think it would be wise to vote for almost anyone who supports the FairTax, and at the very least make some phone calls and demand truth and integrity from those who desire to become elected officials.
Keith Fitzgibbons
Meeker