Over the past few weeks we had been hearing of the IRS denying certain statuses to organizations that have the words “Tea Party", “Patriot”, or “Constitution” in it’s name. That is in and of itself profiling, and one of the things that the IRS should NOT be a part of. In fact, the IRS should be defunded and/or abolished because they are rewarding bad behavior and punishing good behavior.
I know most of you are asking what to replace the IRS with if it is abolished. The answer in my mind is simple. I had devoted earlier rants on this blog (see my Second Rant and my 13th Rant back in 2005 as well as my 19th rant in 2010) to the messed up Federal Tax System and said that we should go to the Fair Tax. In later rants I will go into why I think the Fair Tax is the way to go, but will ask you this. Take a look at the following picture and tell me just which one you prefer.
The two paychecks look similar, don’t they? Well take a closer look. The current paycheck has you losing all your hard earned money before it even reaches your hand due to all of the taxes that Uncle Sam inflicts. This is called taxing PRODUCTIVITY. Normally people who make $5 an hour (for instance) should expect to take home $400 every 2 weeks (not counting taxes) but instead they are taking home $275 – $300 (I know it might not be just like that, but am trying to give an example) every 2 weeks due to Uncle Sam taking that hard earned money out of your pocket.
Now with the FairTax, when you make $5 an hour which leads to $400 every two weeks you TAKE HOME $400 every two weeks. “Well now what about all of the taxes? How does the government get it’s share?” you ask. Well the answer is simple. Let’s say you go to the hardware store and buy a $10 hammer. The hardware store get $7.70 of the money and the remain $2.30 goes to the government. That is called taxing CONSUMPTION or WHAT YOU BUY.
If you want to know more about the FairTax, I will go into the truth of it in later rants, but one thing I recommend is to go to the Fair Tax website at http://www.fairtax.org and check it out. There are also some videos as well on YouTube which I will be playing and discussing in future rants. However, I will say that the FairTax will bring money, jobs, and growth back to the United States of America.
The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.
While de Tocqueville TALKED about American exceptionalism, the specific term was first used in 1929, when the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, disagreeing with Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party of America that America was so resistant to revolution because of the increasing strength of American capitalism, and the country's "tremendous reserve power" (a strength and power which he said prevented Communist revolution), called Lovestone's ideas "the heresy of American exceptionalism." In the 1930s, academics in the U.S. redefined American exceptionalism as befitting a nation that was to lead the world, with the newer United States ready to serve the older European societies as an example of a liberated future free from Marxism and socialism. More recently, socialists and other writers have tried to discover or describe this exceptionalism of the U.S. within and outside its borders.