The federal government already is administering the EITC with no problems. My alternative to a targeted prebate would be to simply retain the EITC, a very popular program aimed at basically the same low income folks. Both are estimated to cost $59 billion annually, a far cry from the Fairtax plan to increase the sales tax rate by 5% in order to redistribute $600 billion annually. Madness!

Please come on over to Fairtaxblog and lets put your prebate plan on the table. Many of the same stalwart participants are still there, both pro and con Fairtax. Blogs such as Fairtaxgroups, Fairtaxnation and ZaptheIRS are great for sitting in circles and holding hands, but they aren’t interested in putting forth a valid message. They just drink the Kool-aide and regurgitate error filled stuff from the Boortz/Linder bibles. No dissent is ever allowed which is why I appreciate the moderators of Fairtaxblog so much. All of this Fairtax propaganda is sure to catch up with AFFT if any hearings are ever held by the W&M Revenue subcommittee. There is no place for marketing BS on Capitol Hill, imho.

I understand your proposal. At first blush, it would seem to be a huge administrative problem. Would all family members get a card, or just the primary contact? Can all 20 million businesses adapt their checkout systems to the card? What is the potential for fraud/counterfeit cards? If the card represents something of value, wouldn’t it still be an entitlement? (Medicare does not increase income, but is an entitlement. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the term “income” as the measure of an entitlement. Perhaps “value” would be more to the point?)

I think you may be on to something and would like to suggest that you come on over to “fairtaxblog.com”, an active site that allows Fairtax pro and con discussions with no character assassinations. If you don’t want to do that, would you mind if I put it to the blog experts for an opinion? There are some pretty sharp minds there and they might provide some excellent input.

Sorry if I seemed to take a snipe at you, but your insistance that the current problems were caused by my generation gets a little tiresome.

I’m afraid we will have to agree to disagree about Social Security, but it saddens me that your generation takes such a dim view of what has been a very successful program. Do I wish we hadn’t allowed Congress to spend the surplus? You bet, and that needs cleaning up sooner rather than later.

As for the prebate, let me try one more time to convince you that the prebate is simply a cash grant entitlement that works as an income supplement to be spent and taxed or saved as needed. Characteristic of an entitlement is if that government check (or whatever payment method is used) increases your annual gross income, then it’s an entitlement. You are correct that income tax deductions, exemptions and “loopholes” are not entitlements, but they are features in the IRC that reduce the amount of taxes owed. But, those IRC items don’t increase your gross income by one thin dime.
There is just no way of getting away from the basic truth that the prebate is an entitlement, and it is being proposed at a time when entitlements are leading to a federal government train wreck. I still believe a targeted prebate or perhaps simply keeping the EITC, a very popular and inexpensive program, would be far better than increasing the Fairtax rate by 4-5 percentage points in order to raise the necessary $600 billion- and counting!

The fact that the elderly and wealthy are more likely to vote is not lost on me nor on the politicians in Washington. Most of the problems in our tax code have been perpetrated by these two intermixed groups. We are about to see the first generation in the history of this country leave a worse situation for their kids than they inherited. That is shameful.

When I speak to a retired person who will come out a little less advantaged under the FairTax than they are under today’s system, I ask them to support it so their kids and grand kids might have the same chance they did.

Regarding the disability part of Social Security, when did we decide as a country that anyone under the height of 5′3″ should automatically get a check from the federal government? I used to live very close to a horse track in Tampa where all the jockeys are very short. They almost all used to be paid wages in the 40K-50K range by their various employers and be taxed on those wages. I spent some time talking to a couple a few years back. Nearly every jockey at the track now gets SSDI because their height qualifies them. Also, nearly every jockey at the track is now paid under the table in cash or in some legal form of non-wage compensation so it doesn’t interfere with their SSDI. So not only do they not pay taxes or voluntarily contribute to FICA anymore, but our system hands out money to these well-paid professionals.

When did we decide as a country that anyone with less than perfect vision should automatically get a check from the federal government? My brother-in-law has an ocular disease commonly referred to as “tunnel vision” He has no peripheral vision and it is getting worse. He was declared “legally blind” ten years ago in his mid thirties. Mind you, he still had a driver’s license for several more years and spends most every day watching reruns on TV. While his wife (my sister) made enough as a nurse to make the mortgage payments on their 250K house, feed the family, and put their two sons through private school, Bill has been getting $1300 a month of taxpayer money.

My favorite quote from Abraham Lincoln says, “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.” In this situation, the poor and the young are the sheep voluntarily contributing 7% of their wages so the wolves can go on cruises. I don’t call correcting that intergenerational class warfare; I call it restoring fairness.