JOHN LINDER: “the President's tax commission has completed its work and sent its report to the Treasury Department. When this started…”

“the President's tax commission has completed its work and sent its report to the Treasury Department. When this started 8 or 9 months ago, I said as often as I could that I wish you would not appoint a commission because the only thing that I have seen commissions do in my lifetime is raise taxes. Only on the rich, of course. Well, guess what: This commission has decided to raise taxes only on the rich. They chose not to do anything bold. They took a tax system that you and I have come to know and love and kept it in place and did nothing to do the exciting things they could have done. The FairTax bill, which I have introduced, would have changed much of what we know about the tax system. For example, the commissioners knew that 22 percent of what we currently pay for at retail represents the embedded cost of the current IRS. You are paying the tax cost and compliance cost of every one of the thousands of corporations and businesses that it took to make that house. The only way a business can pay a bill is through price and consumers are the only taxpayers in the world. They chose to ignore that and leave us disadvantaged in the global economy with a 22 percent tax component in our price system. The FairTax, by getting rid of the IRS, would have ended that. The Tax Foundation has concluded that in 2003 we spent $203 billion just complying with the Tax Code. We spent 6.6 billion man-hours. They chose to ignore that.…”