John Linder Quotes
You replace it by 23 percent tax, a frank, transparent tax embedded in the cost at retail, and everybody gets to takes their whole check home. And the average income earner gets a 50 percent increase in take-home pay.
Linder, John. "The FairTax." Office of Representative John Linder, United States House of Representatives, 2005.
This was a typical argument in the 2012 battle between President Obama and the Republican conservatives. However, this was written 35 years earlier, when the exact same issue was polarizing politicians. The idea for taxing the rich more to reduce the deficit has been around since there was a Federal deficit. On most occasions the rich had enough political clout to avoid additional taxes for them and get the general public to pay instead of them. However, there have been times where they have not been able to avoid increased taxes. The New Deal lead by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Obama administration in 2013 were two such exceptions.
The Roosevelt Administration was committed to the principle that all Americans should bear some part of the sacrifice for the war effort, not only those doing the fighting and dying. The name was in itself a bit of propaganda in that at that point in time, American victory was by no means assured.
The George W. Bush administration when they had a Republican-controlled Congress, had amended the tax laws to treat the earnings of the hedge fund managers differently from people who manage other enterprises in the nation. They gave a group of very wealthy managers whose earnings were already amongst the highest of any managers in the country a huge tax break, while little public attention was paid to the subtlety of complex tax laws. Daschle and others began to draw public attention to the inequity.
He turned out to be very wrong as there were a number of times in American history when there were tax rates in excess of 70 percent, and they were collected.
As a result of years of lobbying many vested interests were getting tax exemptions for their activities. Some of the richest corporations and people paid little or no taxes. This was like the old European monarchies where the dukes and nobles got tax exemptions from the king and the middle class and poor people paid a much larger percentage of their income and wealth than did the nobility. Fairness in taxation is very difficult in practice. See {633629}
John Elmer Linder is an American politician who was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 2011. His district was numbered the 4th from 1993 to 1997, the 11th from 1997 to 2003, and the 7th from 2003 until 2011. He is a member of the Republican Party.
