From a book I’m reading:
It was a “voluntary” tax in the sense that people controlled how much they paid by how much they consumed.”
No, I’m not reading a Neil Boortz book about the Fair Tax. I’m reading “The Whiskey Rebellion : Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution,” by Thomas P. Slaughter (1986). The statement above is in Chapter one, in a description of the much-hated British consumption taxes of the 18th century, usually known as interior taxes or excise taxes. The British government was arguing the same way Neil Boortz does.
Perhaps you should keep reading. I’m fairly certain the British never taxed American whiskey. The first tax on whiskey was passed in 1971 by the United States Congress after the urging of Alexander Hamilton. It was a perfect example of people in power manipulating the system so that the nation’s taxation falls mainly on the poor or working class.
Just like the powerful in Washington have manipulated the income tax so that it is bourne the heaviest by the poor and working class.
It is time we expose the propoganda in our tax tables that claim it is progressive and fight for a complete change to a consumption tax. The FairTax is a great place to start.
The reference to the British is regarding the predecessors of the whiskey tax in 17th and 18th century Britain. They’re all consumption taxes, just like the Neil Boortz Fair Tax. The Neil Boortz fair tax will also fall more heavily on the poor, just like the others. Yes, his fans say I should read the book, that there will be rebates or exemptions for those with lower incomes. But in order to determine who is poor, you need to measure income, which means you need the machinery of the IRS in order to administer the Boortz tax, PLUS you need new bureaucracies to collect the sales tax. And those taxes will be evaded and hated in the same way that the whiskey tax was evaded and hated in the 1790s, which is the same way the British internal taxes were evaded and hated in earlier decades.