With Kevin McCarthy holding the gavel in the House of Representatives, it’s anything goes time in that body. (Given how tenuous McCarthy’s hold on that gavel is what with all the Freedom Caucus hands all over it, actually calling him “speaker” is questionable.) There is no right-wing proposal too wacky to make it to the House floor. Case in point: The Fair Tax Act, which is getting its first floor vote ever as part of the deal McCarthy made with the maniacs to end their opposition to his promotion.
The very first bill Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter filed when he came to Congress in 2015 was this bill, which he picked up from his predecessor in Georgia. It’s been floating around the GOP for more than 20 years, but this is the first time GOP leadership has agreed to give it a floor vote. Because this is the first time GOP House leadership had to promise the world to all and sundry to actually get their jobs. And because this is the first time the GOP leadership have been completely nihilistic numbskulls. So a bill to abolish the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), eliminate the tax code, replace income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate and gift taxes with a 23% national sales tax is going to the floor.
By the way, it doesn’t just abolish the IRS, though that’s the only thing spelled out in the text. It threatens Social Security and Medicare, which run on payroll taxes. The bill would allocate the proceeds from the sales tax to “(1) the general revenue, (2) the old-age and survivors insurance trust fund, (3) the disability insurance trust fund, (4) the hospital insurance trust fund, and (5) the federal supplementary medical insurance trust fund,” but ends the dedicated funding source for the programs in the future. When all the functions of government are coming from one pot of money and social insurance programs have to compete with defense for money, guess what gets sacrificed?
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