JOHN LINDER: “Mr. Speaker, the IRS has made criminals of us all, and it is time for it to go away. And that is what this is about…”

“Mr. Speaker, the IRS has made criminals of us all, and it is time for it to go away. And that is what this is about, scrapping the code. This is real. Now, it may be a joke for Democrats, who have spent 40 years building up this monstrosity, but this is very real. And there are some very real proposals to replace it, proposals that have been studied for years. My proposal, which has been ridiculed today, has been studied for over 3 rac{1}{2} years, with $15 million spent in universities from Harvard to Boston College to MIT to Stanford to Rice, and none of them came up with a 60 percent tax rate. Guess who did? A committee whose members have their entire political capital invested, or their intellectual capital invested in the Tax Code. They would lie to get this thing defeated, because we have depreciated their intellectual capital if we get rid of all the income taxes and all the difficulties and the taxes are transparent and easy to understand. They will not be needed any more. If we get rid of this Tax Code with a single transparent, straightforward, simple sales tax, Americans will know what it costs every time they buy something, what it costs for government. What they are not telling the American public is that currently, as the gentleman from Ohio pointed out, we know that 22 to 25 percent, according to various studies, of what taxpayers currently pay for at retail is the current embedded cost of this tax system.”