JOHN LINDER: “in the last 5 or 6 weeks, a bill that I introduced, H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax, has been getting a great deal of interest in…”

“in the last 5 or 6 weeks, a bill that I introduced, H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax, has been getting a great deal of interest in the national press, part of it because the Speaker mentioned it in the book he recently published, and part because the President took a look at it just prior to the Republican convention. A lot of it is because the last 2 days the Democrats have taken a keen interest in it and have found unusual forums in which to trash it, including a 27-page critique that the House Minority leader put out today. I will say some of those criticisms are interesting, and some are even true. But, in any case, what they failed to do in the 27 pages was to discuss the problems we are facing precisely because of our current system. They can spend all the rest of the next year or two defending the current IRS system, saying it is a good system, and ignoring the problems, but we cannot ignore them much longer. Americans spend between 6 and 7 billion man-hours each year just filling out IRS forms. We spend that much time calculating the tax implications of a business decision. We lose 18 percent of our economy to making tax decisions instead of economic decisions. The current director of the Congressional Budget Office informally in a conversation told me he believes we spend upwards of $400 to $500 billion a year to comply with the Code and remit $2 trillion. This is hardly an efficient way to raise taxes.”