Longshot presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback is pushing the flat tax this week, the week that millions of Americans file their often complex IRS tax returns.
Brownback, who spoke with reporters after meeting with customers at bookstore in Des Moines, Iowa, said his flat tax plan would not, at least initially, reduce federal revenue. "Not as part of a system's change I am proposing," he said. "We would design a system that would yield comparable revenues."
Brownback said several details of his plan haven't been set but would be in the coming months. One possibility is to require taxpayers to pick an option and stick with it for some time, likely five years, he said.
The flat tax idea has been around for years. Brownback is smart to push the idea, but it seems to me its not a smart move to try to re-engineer the concept and come up with something new at this stage of the game...
There's a perfectly good flat tax proposal championed by popular syndicated radio talker Neal Boortz - only it's a flat national sales tax that would replace the IRS rather than a flat income tax as Brownback seems to be suggesting.Brownback and Boortz do share a dislike of the current tax code and the IRS - which puts them in good company with the majority of Americans.
Brownback is having trouble with fund-raising and his presidential bid has yet to gain any serious traction. Seems to me that if he endorsed the plan that Boortz promotes - the FairTax proposal sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Linder - he just might get a lot of free publicity on the Boortz show.
You can read about the FairTax in Boortz' book The FairTax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS.
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