By Jamie Wheeler, Special to the Tri-City Herald
I had the opportunity to participate in the Tri-City Herald's Community Conversation, featuring the tea party as the topic of conversation. It was a great opportunity to talk about the tea party and the FairTax.
Our local tea party enables citizens to educate members and the community about issues they are passionate about. As a member of the Tri-Cities tea party I am also the chairwoman for the FairTax subcommittee.
The FairTax is also a grassroots movement, which wants more liberty for citizens and promotes the free market and capitalist America. The FairTax is a bill (HR25 and S13) currently in Congress.
There is at least one co-sponsor in 22 states, and the co-sponsors in the 112th Congress have already exceeded the number of co-sponsors in the 111th Congress in the House and Senate. Unfortunately, there are not any co-sponsors from the Pacific Northwest, yet.
The FairTax is a flat national retail consumption tax on only new products and services with a prebate. The FairTax is the true jobs bill as it will get rid of the payroll taxes, capital gains taxes and income taxes just for starts.
The FairTax makes it so the government no longer gets a part of our hard earned money before we do, as there will no longer be any federal withholding. With the FairTax, every individual citizen chooses when and how much federal taxes they pay when they choose to spend, rather than on every dollar they earn.
There are thousands of FairTax supporters all over the U.S. Many FairTax Supporters connect on the FairTax Social Networking Site: www.FairTaxNation.com, and find more information at www.FairTax.org.
The FairTax also has a FaceBook fan page with over 94,000 "likes." A new way to learn about the FairTax is the FairTax board game, available at www.theFairTaxGame.com.
The two groups of people who will benefit the least from the passing of this bill are true politicians and lobbyists. When the FairTax passes, the power will be transferred out of the hands of Congress and politicians and into the hands of We the People.
The lobbyists lose when the FairTax passes, because there will no longer be an income tax code to be manipulated by pitting one group of Americans against another or picking winners and losers in the private sector.
More than 400 pages are added to the tax code every year, which is why most Americans have to come up with a compliance cost when filing their annual taxes, which doesn't include time or stress. All that will be gone upon the passage of the FairTax.
Our most basic piece of private property is our paychecks, yet Congress has its cut of our paychecks before our paychecks are deposited into our accounts. Congress also has the ability to take more of our paychecks via payroll tax and federal withholding increases, and there isn't anything we can do about it.
I ask people to take the FairTax challenge as I did. Go get you paycheck and add up FICA/Social Security, Medicare and federal withholding. The total is what your paycheck will increase every payday if the FairTax takes effect.
The FairTax fixes so many of the problems in our country, but Americans can't support something they don't know exists. Americans will have been under the income tax burden for a century in 2013, and the "income tax" idea is one of the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto. Our country was just an idea at one point and became the greatest country in the world, now we have the opportunity to put the power back into the hands of We the People with the FairTax idea becoming law.
There is a lot to learn about the FairTax and it will be good day in America when the media starts informing Americans about a bill in Washington, D.C., that will get rid of the IRS as we know it.
FairTax freedom is what America needs! The 16th Amendment was added to our Constitution in 1913 so it was not an original part of our Founding Father's Constitution, and the FairTax Legislation has wording regarding the repeal of the 16th Amendment. We currently have two presidential candidates endorsing the FairTax: Herman Cain and Gary Johnson.
* Jamie Wheeler is a mother, FairTax advocate and a Tri-City Tea Party member. She lives in Kennewick.
