House May Vote on Abolishing the IRS—and Income Taxes

Five things you should know about the so-called Fair Tax Act.

Fair Tax Act sponsor Earl "Buddy" Carter at a June 2021 "Fire Fauci" press conference. Tom Williams/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Tuesday, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.) introduced the Fair Tax Act, a House bill that proposes to abolish the IRS and replace the progressive federal income tax with a national consumption tax.

“Instead of adding 87,000 new agents to weaponize the IRS against small business owners and middle America,” Carter said in his press release, parroting a well-worn Republican lie, “this bill will eliminate the need for the department entirely by simplifying the tax code with provisions that work for the American people and encourage growth and innovation.”

That last part isn’t exactly true, either. In any case, the first thing to know about this “fair tax” bill is that it doesn’t stand a chance. It is controversial even among conservatives. But the House will reportedly vote on it anyway, because a floor vote was one of the concessions Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made to right-wing members in his bid to become House speaker.

The bill itself is still worth pondering, though, if only because it’s a such a doozy. The “fair tax” is a complete makeover of the federal tax system. It repeals payroll taxes, gift and estate taxes, capital gains taxes, and personal and corporate income taxes. In their place, it institutes a 30 percent levy on all new, finished goods and services. (So that $10 six-pack would run you $13, and the feds get three bucks.)

Sales taxes are regressive—harder on the poor than the rich. To offset that, the proposal calls for monthly government “prebate” checks for all US citizens, payments that would be proportionately more meaningful to lower-income families.

This all might sound appealing in its simplicity: no federal returns, no keeping receipts, no sweating over allowable deductions and credits, no audits—and no IRS. But it’s actually a lot thornier than it seems, and results may vary. Here are a quick five things you should know about the “fair tax,” an expression one should always be careful to put in quotes.

  1. It isn’t new. Versions of the Fair Tax Act, which is based on an idea dreamed up during the 1990s by an advocacy group called Americans for Fair Taxation, have been introduced in almost every Congress since 1999, though they rarely make it out of committee. Most of the backers have been Republicans. In 2003, however, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.)—neither of whom are still in office—cosponsored and introduced such a bill. 
  2. It’s a boon for the wealthy. “The main problem,” UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman told me in an email, “is that it would turbocharge inequality. Because the rich save most of their income.” In other words, replacing income taxes with a consumption tax amounts to a tax cut for the wealthy, whereas folks living paycheck to paycheck would face a substantial tax increase. As I wrote in a recent piece, Zucman and his Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez have found that when all of our taxes (federal, state, and local) are combined, the result is something like a flat tax—averaging 28 percent across income categories. The poorest Americans pay a bit less than average (~25 percent) while most very high earners pay more (30 to 35 percent), but the wealthiest of all, the billionaires, enjoy the lowest overall rate (23 percent). Under a “fair tax” plan, they might pay even less.
  3. It’s terrible for the middle class. Sales taxes, as things now stand, hit the poor hardest, sucking up about 10 percent of their income, while members of the top-earning 1 percent pay only a penny or two in tax per dollar earned. The proposed “prebates” would assuage some of the pain on the bottom end, but the only way to not screw over the middle class would be for the government to take a big revenue hit. In a 2013 interview, American Enterprise Institute tax expert Alan Viard explained to his AEI colleague James Pethokoukis that using prebates “introduces some progressivity, but compared to the taxes they’re replacing, this would be a big shift in the tax burden away from high-income groups toward middle-income and lower middle-income groups. And whatever you think about that politically, I think that’s just not viable.”
  4. Collections and tax evasion would be a huge challenge. As Leonard Burman of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center pointed out a while back, former President George W. Bush’s 2005 tax reform panel rejected the “fair tax” notion because it was regressive and because prebates were expensive, hard for taxpayers to manage, and difficult to administer: “In addition, the panel was concerned a federal retail sales tax rate of 30 percent or more would result in widespread evasion and create real problems for states that rely heavily on their own sales taxes.” Collections and tax evasion are also a major challenge for today’s IRS. But that’s largely due to a dearth of funding over the past decade, and aggressive avoidance tactics by slippery rich characters like Donald Trump. (Maybe a prebate program would help democratize tax evasion!) As for collections, the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration reported in 2020 that nearly 880,000 “high in­come” non-filers from 2014 through 2016 still owed the government $46 billion, and the IRS was in no shape to collect. 
  5. Prebates would necessitate something the right loves to hate. Here’s one aspect of the “fair tax” that should really give pause to small-government conservatives: The Bush panel concluded in its 2005 report that cash payments “designed to reduce the burden of a retail sales tax on lower-income and middle-income taxpayers…would represent a new entitlement program—by far the largest in American history.” The panel estimated these payments would cost (in November 2022 dollars) between $900 billion and $1.2 trillion annually, and would “make most American families dependent on monthly checks from the federal government for a substantial portion of their incomes.”

So again, never gonna pass. But it sure will be interesting to see who votes for it.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate