“Right now the top 50 percent of taxpayers pay almost 96 percent of the taxes. The top income earners--the evil top 1 percent--earn about 16.5 percent of the income and pay almost 33.7 percent of the income taxes. This is what Democrats call "not paying your fair share.”
“A Tax Foundation study for 2002 has found that taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes under $20,000 incur a compliance cost of 4.53 percent of income compared to only 0.29 percent for taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes over $200,000.”
“[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.”
“[W]hen you look at who’ll be collecting this tax, the chances of drumming up a conspiracy suddenly look even worse. In America, .03 percent of all of America’s companies—688 companies, to be exact—sell 48.5 percent of all of the merchandise. Those companies aren't going to help you cheat; there’s simply too much at stake. Date also show that 3.6 percent of all of America’s companies—92,334 firms—collectively make 85.7 percent of all sales… When it comes to the services sector, the fact is that 1.2 percent of all businesses make approximately 80 percent of the sales in the services sector. They have too much to lose to risk helping you cheat. Even if the FairTax were paid only by these few companies, we would still have a better collection rate than the IRS currently has with the income tax.”
“[A] Harvard University study [showed] that, on average, about 22 percent of what you pay for any consumer item or service represents the embedded costs in that item—that is, the embedded costs of our current tax system. Taxes, like some other similarly offensive substances, roll downhill, and you the consumer are standing at the bottom.”
“Let’s look at the state of tax cheating under the current system. In 2001, the last year for which information is available, the IRS reports that it collected $345 billion less than it was owed—or about 16 percent of all that was owed, a figure known as “the tax gap”.”
“the Reagan years "produced one of the most dramatic redistributions of income in the nation's history....The income of families in the bottom decile fell by 10.4 percent...while the income of those in the top one percent rose by 87.1 percent."Chain Reaction, 23”