“Gun buyback programs have to rank at the top of the list of mindless feel-good attempts to address a serious problem in the history of our republic. I once had a statistician from Georgia Tech study these much-hyped programs to determine their effectiveness in reducing murders committed with handguns. To reach a statistical certainty of saving one human life, he found, you would have to buy back about 65,000 handguns. That means that Atlanta's gun buyback programs have not yet saved a single human life. And yet you'll find no shortage of antigun nuts arguing that a life is saved for virtually every gun turned in.”

“[O]ne macroeconomic study of the FairTax—a study that assumed that the employer’s share of the payroll tax is the only tax savings that will be used to lower prices—estimated that prices would rise by 24.8 percent but wages would increase by 27.4 percent, more than compensating for the increase in prices. By these calculations, disposable income is expected to increase by 1.7 percent.”

“The Social Security system is a $75 trillion problem. Again, just to give you a sense of scale: Let’s say you started a business the day Jesus Christ was born. Let’s say you weren’t exactly a good businessman, and your business lost a million dollars every day—right through yesterday. How much longer would it take before your losses added up to $1 trillion? About 718 more years should do it, give or take a few months. And that’s just one trillion. Multiply that by seventy-five, and you have the size of the Social Security problem. That’s the amount it would take to fully fund Social Security for all current workers and retirees. To realize the magnitude of the problem we’re facing, consider the fact that the total of all wealth in America is about $60 trillion. We could confiscate every item of value from every American household, including cash and investments, and apply the value to the problem—and still not have enough money to fund Social Security fully.”

“In the 1990s, the Rand Corporation conducted a study on cocaine use in the United States and various control strategies to reduce that usage...The Rand researchers found that Option 4--the treatment option-- was seven times as cost-effective as Option 3, the domestic enforcement option.”

“Because consumption comes from three sources: income, savings, and borrowings. Stating the obvious, income comes only from income. Our point? FairTax opponents will tell you that the consumption base, the base for national sales tax, isn’t stable and can’t be trusted—but in reality it’s the income tax base that’s unstable and can’t be trusted. The consumption base is much more predictable.”

“No longer would other nations, other economies, be taking business and jobs away from the U.S. economy by enacting their own valuable tax reform and simplification measures. As these nations have enjoyed steady gains, we have distracted ourselves with a cacophony of politicians, from both sides of the aisle, yammering about their favorite ideas for using our federal tax code to punish people they don’t like while rewarding people and industries they do.”

“Let’s pause a moment to think about how much $1 trillion really is. Such large-scale economic matters are often discussed in terms of trillions, but how many people really understand how much a trillion is?Let’s say you've been told you have to wait for something very special for one million seconds. How long would your wait be? A little more than eleven and a half days. But what if you had to wait for one billion seconds? Well, you’d be waiting a little longer: try almost thirty-two years.And for one trillion seconds? We’ll round it off to 31,700 years.”