The Fair Tax | Part 1 (Transcript)

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                         The Fair Tax Part One

You filed your taxes last April, probably dreading the whole mess of forms and receipts. You wondered if the IRS would audit you. Ever wonder what would happen if the IRS just vanished completely? Hi, this is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. And we’re gonna talk today, tax day, April 15th, about taxes.

And a proposal that has been around now for some 25, 30 years called the Fair Tax. And when you really listen to it and I know so many people, the minute they hear about a national sales tax,they’re gonna say, I don’t want nothing to do with it. But if you listen to the entire plan, we’re gonna play a lot of it.

I’m gonna talk through some of it, but we’re gonna play a lot of it. If you listen to what the Fair Tax says to do, you’re gonna find out that it’s the best tax of all. It’s a tax that makes illegal aliens pay their fair share.

It makes billionaires pay their fair share. It makes people who work under the table, who don’t make an income, to tax, pay their fair share. It also makes tourists from other countries coming to America, paying their fair share.

Have you ever heard of a tax like that? Well, it’s called the Fair Tax. And let me play some of the audio on this and maybe explain some more to you what it means. And I’ll break in once in a whileand explain what I think maybe you don’t understand.

Taxes became as simple as buying groceries. Today, I’ll explain the Fair Tax Act of 2025 like you’re five years old. By the end, you’ll understand exactly what abolishing the IRS really means.

You’ll know whether your tax life would actually get easier or just different. By the way, before we continue here, this was a 2025 proposal. And actually, I first heard about it by Neil Bortz listening to the radio, probably in around the year 2002.

I know Herman Cain picked it up for a while when he ran for president, what, in 2016, I think it was. And it just never gone anywhere because I think most people, when you first talk about it,they just tune you out because all they hear is sales tax, national sales tax. But they don’t realize the IRS goes away, audits goes away, H&R Block goes away, penalties and fines go away, and how much money you actually spend out of your pocket goes away.

Let me continue. People here eliminate the IRS and think it means no more taxes at all, like some magical tax-free utopia where your paycheck suddenly gets bigger and nobody ever has to pay the government again. But here’s what nobody tells you.

The Fair Tax Act doesn’t eliminate taxes. It eliminates how you pay them. Instead of the government taking money from your paycheck every two weeks before you even see it, they’d take it differently.

They’d take it when you buy stuff. Every single thing you purchase would have a 23% national sales tax attached. That shirt, plus 23%.

That new phone, plus 23%. Your groceries, your gas, your Netflix subscription, everything. The money still goes to the government.

It just comes out of your wallet at the register. It doesn’t disappear from your paycheck before it reaches your bank account. Now imagine your paycheck as a pie.

Right now, the government takes slices before the pie even gets to your table. Federal income tax takes a slice. Social security takes a slice.

Medicare takes another slice. By the time the pie reaches you, it’s already half eaten. The Fair Tax Act wants to stop that.

They wanna give you the whole pie, every penny you earn, completely untouched. No withholding, no payroll taxes, no income tax forms. Your paycheck would be 100% yours on payday.

And one of the things that is important before we go on with more on the fair tax, what’s important here is people would say, well, how is that gonna make any more money if we don’t tax on income? Well, when you’re taxing people’s income, their productivity, and mainly the people who work are paying all the taxes, the people who don’t work are not paying any taxes at all.People who are in the underground economy do not pay taxes at all. People who are drug dealers and work in cash, again, like underground economy, do not pay taxes, income taxes of any type at all.

When people come from other countries to this country illegally, and they’re living here, working on farms or whatever, they’re not paying any income taxes at all. So as you can see, if you had a broader base of people paying into taxes, you may find yourself having more money and with each person that legitimately pays taxes today, actually paying a heck of a lot less taxes than they did before, because more people now are paying these taxes. I’m gonna get into more of this in a second here so you can understand more about what the fair tax does for you, because there is just so much misunderstanding and I got news for you, that places like HR Block and all these accounting agencies, they really do not want you to know about the fair tax because it does away with them.

How much money do you spend to get your taxes done if you’re a businessman? How much do you worry about being audited if you’re a businessman or you’re quite wealthy? And knowing that you’re taking deductions that just maybe are legal, but you might have to defend. This is all the things that go away and other people share the burden of these taxes. Up next, I’m gonna play Neil Bortz, part one of six of his audios on the fair tax.

He’s the first person, like I told you, that I first heard about the fair tax way back in, I believe, 2001, 2002. And like probably most of you listening to me right now, thought that it was a bogus idea, it would never work, it wasn’t good, we would end up paying more money. The last thing we wanna do is to pay sales tax.

We hate paying sales taxes to the states and in some cases, the local governments today, but then you have to think about, look at the state of Florida. The state of Florida has no income tax.Do you realize that? There’s no income tax in the state of Florida.

There’s a reason why a lot of people moving out of the high tax Democrat states move into places like Florida where there is no income tax. Well, how does Florida make their money? Well, they make their money off a 6% sales tax. And then you gotta ask yourself this question.

Wait a minute, aren’t you paying a 6% sales tax in Connecticut? Aren’t you paying more than that in New York? And yet, Florida can live off a 6% sales tax and no state income tax? Well, this is how they can do it. They can do it because Florida has a lot of tourists, tourists that come from other states, tourists that come from other countries. And they have a lot of illegals working there and they probably have quite a few drug dealers compared to other states.

Well, anybody who buys anything has to pay that sales tax in Florida. And all of these years, Florida has done really well with just a sales tax and no income tax. And maybe if the federal government was just to follow the same principle that the state of Florida and some other stateswithout sales taxes, by the way, follow, maybe everybody would be better off and the people that are working hard every day wouldn’t see all their money go to pay to the government and for boondoggle spending on top of that.

So, like I said, we’re gonna play a little bit of Neil Bortz now, the first person I heard about this and listen to what he has to say about the fair tax. For another BortzCast. All right, my friends, today is the 17th day of April and oddly enough, tomorrow, the 18th day is tax day.

Well, I guess that’s because tax day fell on Saturday and it was the Easter holiday and people are taking three-day weekends, so we all know. By the way, I’m gonna interrupt this. This was a six or seven year show.

I think it was from 2017. Today is tax day. So don’t listen to this and think you got another day to pay your taxes.

Today is the tax day, April 15th, but let’s continue. How generous the IRS is all the time, right? So they pushed tax day off to today. So this particular BortzCast is all about taxes.

It’s not going to be dull. After all, together with Georgia Congressman John Linder, I wrote a book called the Fair Tax Book, which debuted number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So I can take the subject of taxes and I can make it interesting to you and I can have you marching in the streets by the end of this.

I don’t have any notes, no notes in front of me. This is not written out. This is all extemporaneous.

Why don’t we get started? First of all, let’s get to one basic truth, one basic reality. All wealth in America is held by individuals. Now, some people can say all wealth is held by individuals or the church.

That’s a fine little distinction and it has some validity. But for the purposes of discussions on taxes, the income tax and the fair tax, all wealth is held by individuals. Therefore, all taxes are paid by individuals because taxes constitute the seizure of wealth by the government.

In this case, we’re talking about the federal government. And if wealth is going to be seized, I mean, let’s face it, not much of the money the federal government spends is donated. So if wealth is going to be seized, it’s gonna be taken from individuals.

And that includes business taxes and that includes corporate taxes, yeah? Our tax structure has personal income taxes and corporate income taxes. That is a load of hooey. Corporate income taxes are a fraud.

They are a subterfuge. Corporate income taxes exist because it is in the minds of government and politicians a clever way to hide from individuals the true nature of their tax burden. Corporations do not pay taxes, period, end of story.

They collect taxes and pass those taxes off to the government. And basically, there are three places, three collection points for corporations to collect the taxes they pass off to the government. One of them is consumers, the people who purchase, who consume the corporation’s products or services.

Number two is the owners of the corporation. In other words, the shareholders. The corporation merely takes the taxes out of the money that is to be distributed to the owners, to the shareholders, and instead pays that money to the federal government.

And number three, the corporation will get the money it pays in taxes from the employees of that incorporation. And this is done by several different ways. The denial of pay increases.

No, we can’t pay you more because we have to pay more taxes. Pay cuts. We’re gonna have to take money out of your paycheck because our tax bill has just gone up.

Or by simply refusing to hire more employees because the corporate’s tax burden is simply too high and there’s not enough money left over to hire new people. So those people sort of by default are helping to pay that corporation’s taxes. So there’s one fact you need to know right there.

Businesses, corporations don’t pay taxes. They collect them and pass them on to the government. I think that’s probably the biggest fraud that Democrats and many Republicans have been able to put over on the American people for years now.

That corporations do not pay their fair share of taxes and we need to increase corporate income taxes much more to get corporations off welfare. And people believe this. And too many people who really don’t know much about government and much about taxation and much about money actually believe that corporations should pay a lot more taxes.

Now, I got a question for you. Make it real simple before Neil Borch continues here. Let’s say a corporation sells something for a dollar.

It cost them 80 cents to make it. It cost them 90, another 10 cents for labor and they make a profit of 10% and then they have to pay a tax on that profit. Let’s say people wanna see it at 40%.

So they would pay another four cents on that 10 cents. So their profit now would be six cents versus four cents. Well, they don’t wanna have a six cent profit because it’s not very much to show to stockholders.

Stockholders, by the way, own stock. People like you and I own stock in our 401k and our IRAs.We don’t even realize we’re stockholders and we don’t wanna have bad returns on our money, do we? We want stocks to keep going up and we want the dividends to keep going up.

Well, so what’s the corporation do for that four cents that they have to pay to the government?They increase their price by four cents. So who paid that four cents? You did when you bought the candy bar. You don’t even know you paid four cents.

When you say, well, I paid 37.7% of my income last year and all my taxes put together. No, you didn’t. You paid over 50% because you’re paying taxes on things you buy from corporations who are paying your taxes for you that they’re putting into the cost of the things you’re buying and you don’t even know it.

That candy bar maybe could sell for 90 cents versus a dollar if it wasn’t for government taxes.And that’s the thing that Democrats, all Democrats and most Republicans or many Republicansjust simply do not want you to know. Let’s continue.

All wealth is held by individuals. All taxes are taxes on wealth. Individuals pay all taxes.

But the way individuals pay taxes now is horribly convoluted with 76,000 pages of tax rules and regulations. The net effect of this being that you really just don’t have any idea how much you’re paying, do you? Now, here is something that politicians love. I mean, all politicians.

I don’t care how much they preach the mantra of tax reform. Here is a fact that makes them smile.As we approach tax day today, go ask some of your coworkers or what have you, how much did you have to pay taxes and taxes this year? And more often than not, you’re going to get the answer.

I didn’t have to pay anything. I’m getting some back. Now, think about that for a moment, folks.

Just let that answer swirl around in your brain for a minute. I didn’t have to pay anything. I’m getting some back.

The question wasn’t what extra did you have to pay right now after they withheld taxes from your paycheck all year long? No, the question was how much did you pay in taxes for last year? I didn’t have to pay anything. I’m getting some back. The reality is most people, most people do not have a clue how much in income taxes they paid for tax year 2016.

They couldn’t hit it within 20% of what the actual figure was. And politicians love this because the less aware the people are of just how much they’re paying in income taxes, the safer the politicians who manipulate the tax code and take this money for their various vote buying schemes, the safer they are. Now, I’m- I’m going to interrupt again.

And I was just going to say the same thing that I have had many employees over the years. I’ve run my own businesses. I work for other businesses.

I’ve always been a boss. I’ve been an employee at the beginning of my career, but I’ve mainly been a boss. And you ask a person, let’s say a person is making $1,000 a week gross pay, and you’re taking out about $200 worth of Medicare, income taxes, Medicaid, and also maybe their insurance, maybe eight or $12 out of their insurance, right? Then they take home out of that maybe $740 or maybe $700 to make it simple.

And then you would say to the people, you’re going to hire somebody and say, what are you making where you’re working now? Oh, I’m only making $700 a week. That’s what people will tell you. I’ve had this happen my entire career in the businesses that I’m in, that people will tell you what the paycheck says that it is.

I remember way back in the eighth grade, I had a teacher named Thomas Quinlan who said, if they paid you all of your money every Friday, and let’s say you made $100 a week, this was 1968, and you had a 25% tax bracket, and they gave you a check for $100. And they said, oh, before you can get this check, we need a check from you for $25 for your taxes. There would have been a rebellion in this country years ago.

But because they withhold it without you ever seeing it, you think the amount of money that’s paid on that check is how much money you make. You don’t realize there’s Medicare, there’s the other side of Medicare, there’s FICA, the other side of social security, everything is taken out of that check that you would have made if you didn’t pay those taxes. And that is something that I’ve seen happen over and over and over again.

Let’s finish here with Neil Bortz here, and then I’ll conclude the show. I’ll tell you about the fair tax in a minute, but just know this, why isn’t the fair tax a huge part of the tax reform discussion going on in Washington right now? Why not? Why aren’t you hearing about the fair tax? The bill is in the Congress, it’s there. It’s been there for years, introduced and reintroduced into every session of Congress in the Senate and in the House.

But to understand why it is not embraced and eagerly pushed by congressmen and senators, you have to understand this. And you will see why I say this when I start to explain the fair tax to you.The fair tax, if enacted, would be the most massive transfer of power from government to the people in the history of the United States of America.

That’s not hyperbole, that is the truth. It would be the most massive transfer of power to the people in our history. Now, I ask you, do you think these congressmen and these senators are ready to freely allow a massive transfer of power from them to the people? Do you think they’re tired of the power they have? Are they tired of wielding power? Are they tired of being so important? Gee, I have too much power up here.

I just have too much power as a senator. I have just too much power as a member of the House of Representatives. It is time for me to hand some of this power back to the people.

And I know the best way for me to do that is to get this fair tax enacted. Hell no, these people are not going to talk and think that way. Some of them, maybe.

For the most part, uh-uh. They hold onto their power like a baby holds onto a pacifier. A dog to a bone.

Nancy Pelosi to ugly. Donald Trump to his tax returns. And that hair, my God, that hair.

There’s all sorts of ways our current tax code can be used by politicians to wield power. Under Barack Obama, Lois Lerner at the IRS, let’s punish those conservatives out there. They’re not in favor of our policies, so let’s go after them and try to deny them their tax-exempt status and damage them with our tax code.

Or, hey, I want to get elected, or I want to get reelected, and I know that there are a lot of people out there who are potential voters that are really ticked off because some people have a lot more success, a lot more income, a lot more money than they do, so I’ll use the tax code to punish those people that have a lot in order to gain the support of those people that don’t have so much.There’s a business in my district that needs help competing with districts or other businesses in other districts, so we’re going to pass some special tax breaks for the business in my district to give them advantages over others. There’s as many ways to take advantage of the tax code to wield power, personal political power, as there are different congressmen and senators.

So I’m gonna start to explain the fair tax to you. A lot of you already know much about it anyway,but I just want you to understand. Politicians love our tax code because it gives them power,because it can be manipulated to keep them in power, because it makes government strong and powerful, and they aren’t going to willingly step forward and change this.

The only way our tax code gets changed, the only way the fair tax ever gets enacted is if the people, not the politicians, the people of this country just, by God, demand it, if they let these politicians know, you like your job in Washington, you like the power, you like being an honorable congressman and honorable, well, then you had better enact this tax code. It is the fair tax, a condition of your continued employment. And that was the part one of six, and we’re gonna have some more on the fair tax tomorrow, because I think this is a subject that we just have to consider as a nation if we’re gonna rein in our $40 trillion debt.

We are going down the tubes. I personally believe, and I have to say this because I believe in the Bible. The Bible predicts we are gonna go down the tube because if you know who we are in the pages of the Bible, if you know the identity of the United States of America, you know our awful future.

And I do know what our awful future is. But saying that, God does listen to people who react to God, put their hope in God, repent, and ask God for forgiveness and get more time from God. And the way that we can get out of our doldrums, the way we can get out of our debt, the way we can get out of our inflation, inflation is a result of taxation and of overspending.

That is where we’re getting inflation from. From 1795 to 1925, the United States had 0% inflation.How did that happen? Because we did not overspend our means and we did not have an income tax that allowed us to spend over our mean.

Tomorrow, we’re gonna continue with this, more with nail boards on the fair tax, because I think if you guys out there listening to me right now understood it, you would see that people would still pay their taxes, but a lot easier. They wouldn’t be worried about an IRS coming and throwing them in jail for something they didn’t do. How about that, Martha Stewart? And knowing that there are cheats out there not paying their fair share because they can get away with it.

And that is especially the people in the underground economy. The fair tax, if you give it a chance,is going to make life a lot better for America and make America back into a powerhouse of the world again. And believe it or not, we would see many more people, many, many more people want to do business in America because they would see the strength that we have as a nation.

Here is a sample of what we’re gonna have tomorrow. The story of the fair tax, just remember these things. Corporations don’t pay taxes.

Businesses don’t pay taxes. They collect them from customers, from employees, and from owners, shareholders. Pass them on to the government.

And he goes on to say, and I’m gonna play the very end of it, how many companies would come to America to build? We wanna get manufacturing back to America. The fair tax is the way to do it.Let’s listen to this and then we’ll have part two of this tomorrow.

Folks, think about that. What does that do for job prospects? What does that do for job prospects in this country? With the fair tax, there would be such an expansion of job opportunities in this country that you would basically have to hide under your bed to avoid a good paying job if you had any drive and any job skills at all. That is what the fair tax can bring to this country.

It could save us from our doldrums. It could also get the money from the people who are not today paying their fair share of taxes. And that’s not millionaires, and that’s not big businesses or little businesses.

It’s the people who just simply don’t pay taxes because they are drug dealers or they’re touristsor they are just in an underground economy. It’s what we need. Tomorrow we’ll have part two and I have more of what Neil Bortz has to say about it.

He’s the person I first heard it from many years ago and I have been a proponent of the fair tax now going on for some, I don’t know, 20 some years and to a lot of deaf ears. And I hope that people wake up and realize that the income tax is causing America to absolutely force people not to wanna work. How many times, if you are an employee, how many times have you heard another employee say, I’m not gonna take overtime? If I take overtime, it’s all gonna get taxed anyway and I won’t bring anything home.

Now, Donald Trump passed a rule that we’re not gonna tax overtime, baloney. It’s gonna happen.Whenever you have an IRS, whenever you have an income tax, the minute Donald Trump’s gone,you’re gonna be taxed again.

It was a campaign move, this no tax on tips campaign move, it’s gonna be reversed. We need a national sales tax and abolish the IRS and the absolute Gestapo tactics of the IRS. Well, anyway, this is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth today, which is brought to you by theplaintruth.com and it is the one place to go to find out what’s happening, what you can do about it, what you should know about it, like today’s show about taxes and how you can maybe have a better system of taxes than we’ve been doing.

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This is Bob Barney for theplaintruth.com saying thank you for listening. We do appreciate you.Until tomorrow, bye-bye.