Sen. Jerry Moran said he thinks now is the best opportunity conservatives have ever had to abolish income taxes in favor of funding government with sales taxes because of an IRS political scandal and data security breaches at the agency.
And Rep. Lynn Jenkins said the federal tax code is “three times the size of the Bible, with no good news.”
The two Republican federal lawmakers from Kansas headlined a rally Tuesday in Wichita stumping for “Fair Tax,” a national campaign to do away with income and wealth-based taxes and replace them with taxes on consumption.
About 200 people attended the meeting at the Wichita State University Metropolitan Complex. By a show of hands, almost all indicated they favor the “Fair Tax” concept, and questions were mostly focused on tactics for passing it in Washington.
Activists at the entrance offered T-shirts for donations, the shirts reading “Taxing Income is Stealing.”
The “Fair Tax” proposal would abolish personal and corporate federal income taxes and phase out the IRS. It would also do away with gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare and self-employment taxes.
The “Fair Tax” plan would replace those taxes with a 23 percent sales tax on new goods and services, which supporters say would raise about the same amount of money as the current tax code. Taxpayers would get a sales tax “prebate” on spending up to the poverty level.
The concept is similar to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s “Glide Path to Zero” tax plan, which envisions eliminating state income taxes and funding government primarily through sales and consumption taxes.
Moran, one of two primary sponsors of the “Fair Tax” proposal in the Senate, said he thinks the current tax code is terrible.
“It’s broken, and it needs to be fixed,” he said.
He said the long-simmering scandal around alleged IRS targeting of conservative political activist groups and new revelations of hackers stealing personal data from the agency open a door to abolishing the IRS.