Bob Barney: The Fair Tax and How to Make America Really Great (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Bob Barney: The Fair Tax and How to Make America Really Great

Hello, this is Bob Barney with the Plain Truth Today broadcast, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one place you go to every day to find out what the real important news is for you, your life, your family, and your future. It also brings up what happened in the past that will have a bearing on your future. Today I’m going to talk about some different issues or different ideas that I have.

2:01 It’s kind of more like a generic show, not probably dated, you know, to today’s news, but it’s all about today’s news and tomorrow’s news as well. About two years ago, I believe, maybe even two and a half years ago when the show was brand new, I was talking about the fair tax and what I would do if I was in charge to try to change this economy. And at the time, I was very much pro-Trump to make sure that he was the person that would get the nod to go ahead, and I do believe that he was the best choice still of what we had running. I have not been happy with what I’ve seen in the first three or four months of the Trump administration, but hopefully he can get his act together before the midterms, because if the elections were held probably this October or November time in the fall, I would say the Republicans would handedly lose the House and probably even be very close to losing the Senate. That is because there was a report out the other day, a poll, that the strong MAGA supporters who were not ever Trumpers, let’s say, they were the Black community who went and voted for Trump, the Hispanic community that went and voted for Trump. In recent polling, if there was an election this fall, these people simply would not even show up. They wouldn’t support Trump, or would they show up? Now, some people won’t show up because it’s not a presidential election, and they would show up for Trump maybe, but they certainly wouldn’t show up for Republican congressmen or senators. It’s very bad news for the 26 Republican team if they want to be reelected. However, I will say this. I will say that if the Democrats keep acting the way they have been for the last six months and beyond, the Republicans cannot pay for better advertising for their cause than the Democrats in office today, because they are the most insane, out-of-touch party I have ever seen in my life, ever.

No one could be worse than the Democrats are today. 

What I wanted to get into was some things that I mentioned in that broadcast a few years ago about things that I think should be done for this country that would instantly turn around the productivity of this country.

5:56 One of the big problems that we had, and I was mentioning a week or so or two ago about Mike Rowe’s broadcast on the 500,000 tradesman-type jobs that are open to this day. There are 500,000 jobs not filled for welders, for body shop mechanics, for painters, for all sorts of tradesmen, electricians, plumbers, you name it. There’s over 500,000 jobs open today that are not being filled. And he made the point, well, if we’re going to open up new factories here and open up a potential 10 million new jobs, who are going to fill those 10 million jobs if we can’t even fill 500,000 jobs today? And that was a good point. And I mentioned that, and I have been mentioning that over the tariff nonsense for a long time. This is why I’m against the tariffs, and I have been against the tariffs. There are times that you have limited tariffs, like maybe China on certain things, but you don’t declare war on the entire world and have tariffs around the world thinking that’s going to support your business and give you the tax money you need to give away money to waitresses who do not deserve a tax break on their tips, to be perfectly honest. They do not. It does not.It is not worth giving away three quarters of a trillion dollars over 10 years, that’s what it works out to be, in order that waitresses can pay tips, I’m sorry, pay taxes on three to four dollars an hour salary. Did you hear what I just said? Three dollars an hour, or maybe four dollars an hour salary. That’s all they’re going to declare now, because they won’t have to declare any tips.

7:38 That is 90% of their income. So some poor slob, well, like I said last time, working in a paint factory at 100 degrees, picking up 100 pound bags of chemicals and ingredients and 55 gallon drums weighing 440 pounds of resins and solvents to be able to pour into a pot at zero degrees in the wintertime and 100 degrees in the summertime, they’re going to be taxed 100% on any income they make, and they make, most of them make a lot less money, and this is manufacturing jobs, not service jobs here, make a lot less money than a lot of waitresses and waiters and bartenders in this country. It just simply did not make sense. First of all, there should be no income tax whatsoever. There is nothing to stop people from wanting to work than the federal income tax. It’s regressive, and it should never have been allowed to go as far as it has. The answer, as I pointed out many years ago on theplaintruth.com, you can look it all up, or on the broadcast two and a half years ago, the the plain truth answer to our tax situation is something called the fair tax, and let me get into that fair tax again, because so many people, when you mention it to them, they’ve either never heard of it or they are totally not informed what it does. The fair tax does away with the IRS. It does away with the income taxes.

9:01 No one will ever pay income taxes again, not the rich, not the poor, or anyone in between. What it does do is it levies anywhere from an 18 to 20 percent sales tax on everything that you buy, cars, boats, new homes, everything, and you say, wait a minute, that ain’t any good. That’s going to cost some people more money. That’s too many taxes. No, that’s not the case. When you really study the fair tax, and I really do recommend people go to fairtax.org and read about it, and you may be surprised, the average poor person, the average middle-class person, and even the average upper-class person will not pay more money than they are today. In fact, they will save money over what they’re paying today for the most part. Where does this money come from? It comes from people who want to consume. It’s an anti-consuming tax, and so you can say, well, that’s going to hurt industry.

No, because what the government will do is send every man, woman, and child every month a check for $500 to offset the taxes on the goods and services they want to buy, the food they want to buy, the clothes they need to buy, or any luxuries they need to buy. You take a family of four, that’s $2,000 a month to cover taxes. You would have to, at 20%, what’s that, five times, you’d have to spend $10,000 a month on groceries, clothes, and luxury items before you even get into your own pocket.Think about that. But who does pay that 20% that hasn’t been paying right now? The illegal alien that goes to the convenience store and buys a bottle of booze, or the drug dealer who’s buying a brand new $100,000 Escalade, or the tourist from Europe, or China, or Africa, or wherever they’re coming to, coming to the United States, going to Disney World, now they’re going to pay a 20% tax on every movie they go to, every restaurant they go to, people who are not paying you taxes today. You know, that’s what they’re doing in Europe.

11:43 Donald Trump thinks we have this 20% tax against Americans called the VAT tax in Europe, but that’s not really what it is. Europe charges a 20% sales tax on all goods and services. That is what we need to do, and that way any car coming in, any steel product coming in, and or any of our own steel products that we make will have a 20% tax. And the only people that would be exempt from that 20% tax are corporations that are buying from other corporations to buy wholesale items, raw material items, that would have a sales tax-exempt number and they would not be paying that tax. So you would not be paying a VAT tax or a sales national sales tax on something that already had one levied against it. It’s that simple. And when the studies were done, it turned out, believe it or not, it turned out that only the very top 10% of Americans would see an increase in their taxes. Why is that? Because they have every loophole in the world not to pay income taxes, many of them do, but they all consume high-end luxury products, and they are not going to stop consuming high luxury products. And so therefore, they’re going to be paying a bigger proportion of the sales tax the national sales tax than is the average Joe and Mary out there going to do.

12:56 You know, many states do this. Florida, for example, has a sales tax and no income tax, and Florida has always money in their coffers. There’s many states that survive only off a sales tax, and most states up until about 25 years ago, almost all states didn’t have an income tax. They survived off their sales tax until they allowed their politicians in their state capitals to go run amok and spend money that they didn’t care about how it was going to affect the people. And then they found out, oh, the sales tax not covering our big time spending anymore. So what are we going to do? We’re going to have to have an income tax. So now you get like Connecticut and New York and California, not only do they have this big sales tax on their goods and services, they have an income tax on the people who are hardworking people. And what do those people do if they’re smart? They flee to Florida. They flee to the places that do not have an income tax. That’s simple. And if the United States did this, we would see a great investment from foreign people, number one, because our economy would boom like we haven’t seen it boom probably in 75 years. That’s the truth.

It would boom greater than it did ever, even under Ronald Reagan, because he was saddled with a very, very harsh income tax. He lowered taxes. But when you see what rate they were and what he lowered them to, heck, what he lowered them to was 20% more than we’re paying today. And that is why he had such a hard time turning the economy around in the 1980s because of the high taxation. High taxation stops people from wanting to work. Instead of not taxing overtime and not taxing waitresses and not taxing senior citizens, how about give them $500 each a month and tax them what they buy, what they consume. Don’t exempt anything, not clothes, not food, anything. Because the truth of the matter is, if you can’t, with $500, buy enough food, clothing, and what you want to survive in this great United States of ours, then you deserve what happens. Because there is no way, like I said, a family of four needs to spend $10,000 a month on food and clothing and necessities of life.It just doesn’t have to happen. And so therefore, you can see that before anybody really wants to pay in more taxes on the sales tax, that’s how they do it. They decide one month, I’m going to buy this big thing and I’m going to come out of my pocket and pay this.

16:32 But the next nine, 10 months, they don’t pay nothing. They don’t pay hardly anything. And they still get that $2,000 a month’s worth of checks in. This is how it works. I really do believe that people need to look at the fair tax. Again, I mentioned this again on this show, fairtax.org and see what it means and how everybody would be paying their fair share, not just a few rich people out there that’s trying to carry the load of everybody and especially that middle-class working slob who is carrying the rest of the load of everyone. And with all the welfare cheats and all of the other people working under the table, that goes away. The benefit of it all goes away. And that’s very important. That’s why we need it. And something else we can do, instead of tariffs, in place of tariffs, to support the businesses that we need back here to manufacture for national security purposes. We must admit, first of all, not every single product, not every single food that we consume, not everything that we buy needs to be protected by tariffs. Because simply stated, we’re not going to get coffee growing in America. We’re not going to get most bananas grown in America. We’re not going to get everything we want in America.

It doesn’t matter if Italy makes great leather Italian shoes, or that Singapore makes a lot of underwear a lot better and cheaper than we could ever do in this country. And then the idea, then you hear people talk about, you know, they’re going to bring back manufacturing, but they’re going to have robotics do it to keep it much cheaper, and it’ll be even cheaper than the foreign countries. Well, what does that do for American workers? Robotics replace American workers. So, you know, they’re talking in doublespeak. If you really want to help the businesses that we need to help, the steel business, the nuclear business, the oil and gas business, the pharmaceutical business, all the things you would need to wage war that you would have to produce on your own, you can do so through all types of incentives. Since the income tax would be gone away in my policies, there would be no income tax. So, therefore, you could not give tax credits, for example, to big corporations to relocate here or to invest here. But what you could do is give plain old government grants, things that we did in World War II, for example, to make sure that Ford could build tanks or Jeeps, for example, or airplanes. Do you know that the Ford Motor Company built a bunch of airplanes? I think they were the B-24s. I think that’s what they were. And they built most of them, hundreds of thousands of them. Ford Motor Company did that.They got into the aircraft business. This is what you can do when the government gives right incentives. For example, in the nuclear industry, right now we’re using fission. And fission is very dirty nuclear energy compared to what fusion would be. Fusion is the power of the sun. And the sun can burn almost forever and never burn up.It doesn’t have that much waste. And if we could get fusion working in our nuclear power plants, something the size of a golf ball could probably power a city of a million for 100 years before it would have to be changed, if that. That’s the idea of fusion.

18:21 Now, it’s basically been proven mankind can do it because I believe there is a lab somewhere in Switzerland, if I recall right, you can look that up, and see that they have been working on fusion now for some 20 some years. And they have actually, in a limited scale, been able to produce a fusion reaction. By the way, fusion is what the hydrogen bomb is made out of. The atom bomb was fission. And the hydrogen bomb, which is many, many more times powerful than an atom bomb, uses fusion, the power of the sun. So they’ve been able to do stuff with fusion in some labs. But if we put the effort, just think about this, if the United States government put in billions of dollars, like they waste on transsexual studies and all this crap they’re wasting our money on, if they put a grant and they gave a corporation or a person a bounty of, let’s say, a billion dollars bounty, if you could come up with a way to make fusion work economically quickly and within a few years, and you would have the best minds in the world looking to make that money, and trying to come up with ways to do so. And I would say like, the same thing with the Manhattan Project that made the A-bomb, happened in five years’ time or less. The same thing when Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon by the end of the century and bring him home safely again.

Well, you want to know what? It was a pretty impossible task, but NASA was able to do it. There were some hiccups and deaths along the way, but NASA was able to do it, even with those hiccups in between. And this could happen again. And if the United States could develop fusion, it would put the United States a million years ahead of any other country. We could keep that technology for ourselves, and we could, I wouldn’t even license it, I would find a way maybe to have our power plants under our own military control in friendly nations as a way to make money. But at the same time, I would not let that technology out. And we could have absolute, almost free energy in America for our manufacturers and for our people, and for all the AI that needs to have so much electricity. We could completely secure our grid, and the answer is fusion energy. And that’s just something, again, that if we put our minds behind like we did in World War II, behind the Manhattan Project, or behind putting a man on the moon, we could easily do the same thing again when it comes to energy.

The other thing I want to talk about is another old idea I had, how to improve Congress, and how to improve political discourse in America, and not walk away from the Democratic Republic that we have. I have stated, and I wrote this article for the WorldNet Daily online news site, I would say 20 years ago now, maybe a little longer. And I said that the answer to politicians having their hand out with all these lobbyists, and all of these people with money behind them, the rich companies and all that, is to drastically increase the numbers of members of the House. When I first said this to my brother-in-law, and I said it to other people, they thought I was nuts. You’re going to actually increase this bureaucracy, call the government, more people to Washington? No, they wouldn’t go to Washington. They would all go within their home with a secure, and this could be done very securely, I guarantee you, anything can be done securely, remotely.

21:33 And they would vote on all of the bills as the majority. There would be a super Congress, which would be the, let’s say 500 members from 435, maybe 500, maybe 700, in Washington, D.C. Then there would be the sub-super Congress, would be all the people voting for each district. So this way, let me explain what this means, because I think I’m confusing myself. What it means is, right now, if you live in most districts, you have no chance of knowing your congressman, because there’s probably two or three or 400,000 people in that district, and they won’t know you from Adam, and you’re going to have a hard time meeting them. But let’s say we had 24,000 congressmen, and every neighborhood had its own congressman. You say, well, that would be too… No, it would not be, because what you would have then is more representation of the people than you’ve ever had. You would be able to go across the street and talk to someone who had a vote in Washington, D.C. He didn’t go there, but had a vote there, or she did. And it would actually bring more people into government and caring about their government if they could only deal and talk with people who are making decisions for their lives. And I got another question.

22:25 Is there enough lobbyist money to pay for all of those congresspeople I’m talking about? No. They’re going to be honest people. First of all, I wouldn’t pay them. It would be a citizen-type thing. They would get just, because they’re doing it from home, they would get all the equipment they need and all the staffing they need to do that paid for. But they themselves, probably you’d pay them no more than $10,000 a year, if that. That’s the way it used to be when our forefathers envisioned Congress, when people could literally walk into their congressional district’s office in their hometown, sit down and talk to their congressman most of the months of the year because they weren’t even in Washington, D.C. that often. That’s the way it was intended to be. Intended to be the government by the people, not government by the special interest and government by the big buck or the pharmaceutical industry or this big business or that big business.

That’s what you have today. Our form of government is simply not working. If it doesn’t work pretty soon, the way I’m outlining it, we’re going to lose this form of government and we’re going to go totalitarian. I ‘ve got news for you. The Bible predicts this is going to happen to us eventually, but it doesn’t have to happen to us overnight. It doesn’t have to happen to us in the next 10 years. I’m afraid in the next 10 years, we could see a major, a major loss of freedom in this country and maybe even taken over by foreign entities that will tell us what to do when our debt crisis blooms and forces a national bankruptcy and a depression, a Great Depression that will make the former Great Depression look like it was a minor recession because America is, you’re listening to a lot of people today who are telling you what I’m telling you. Maybe they’re sugarcoating it a little bit like Jamie Dimon, but they’re telling you we’re at the precipice. We’re going to fall off a cliff and nothing is being done about it because of special interest money. And if we don’t do something pretty quickly, we are going to find ourselves in a national disaster that no nation has ever experienced with our power. No one would know what the outcome would be, but I do know what the outcome would be. It would be totalitarianism.

24:56 It would be dictatorship. It would be under, which the Bible will predict, under the beast or the Antichrist of the Bible, who’s going to come out of Europe, by the way. That’s what’s going to happen. But we can forestall that. I’ve told you this time and time again. If this nation was to turn back to God and to pray to God, confess our sins, and if you don’t think this nation has a lot of sins to confess, then you are part of the problem, confess our sins to God and ask God to heal this nation. And if we did so collectively, God would listen, because God says he will listen. And they will, God the Father and Jesus Christ the Word, will protect and heal this nation. And until another generation arises that’s not going to pay attention to what you guys or we all do, if we do go to God, and another generation will come and revert right back to what’s going on now. Is that what you read in the Bible? You know, you’d have one Israeli king, Israelite king was good, like David, and he’s followed by, you know, his grandson, Jeroboam, who was an idiot. And then there’s a good king, Hezekiah, then there’s a bad king, like Ahab. This is what happens today. And what happened after about 150 years of that? Israel fell. And another 75, 100 years later, Judah fell, to the barbarians, to the Babylonians, to the Chaldeans, to the Assyrians. This is what happens when you do not listen to God.

26:33 God is the protector of this country, and God has the answers what to do and what not to do. And that’s my show for today. I’m going to get into a little commercial for the plain truth, but the gist is this country still is savable if people turn to God and we do away with the policies that have put us where we are. Sanctions, like I said, tariffs and sanctions, that just helps bad businesses remain in business. You don’t want bad business and bad business leaders to remain in business depending on a government tariff in order to survive. They’re never going to compete in the rest of the world. We need businesses that compete in every nation in the world and out-compete China and out-compete the Europeans and out-compete anybody else from Japan. But that’s not going to happen with tariffs. It’s not going to happen with welfare. It’s not going to happen when people don’t learn trades because they can stay home on their computer and get money from Uncle Sam or under the table, doing jobs under the table, not paying their income taxes. This is what’s got to happen. And we got to have a new renewed spirit of this country.

27:05 And if we do, we have a bright future for 50, 75 years. If not, we have a very bleak future. ThePlainTruth.com, and I’m going to get into that, is the one site you go to. You can listen to these broadcasts or other people. We play many other broadcasts. You can also go to the Your Health Today section. It’s a separate website. You go from the main page of ThePlainTruth.com and you click on Your Health Today, and you will see very timely topics about health issues that can help you and your family diagnose diseases and problems that you’re having, and maybe what to do about them. You know, God has a lot to do with your health. You know, God has a diet you’re supposed to follow. I don’t think most people know that. You know one thing that’s not supposed to be in anybody’s diet? Pork. Well, I don’t know something else that’s not supposed to be in anybody’s diet? Shellfish, clams, lobsters, skinned fish like catfish. God says don’t eat them. God says to eat only those animals that have hoofs and they chew their cud, and like the cow, like the goat, like the sheep, like the deer, like the elk.

28:03 God tells you what, in his Bible, God tells you what you should and should not eat, but we don’t listen to God, and The Plain Truth and Your Health Today will show you what you can do to help overcome some of the illnesses you have. Then, of course, we have the message board, and I talk about the message board all the time because of the fact there is more news and more reaction on the message board than anything else we do. It’s usually seven, eight, ten news stories a day, or responses to older stories, or updates to stories, a phenomenal search engine on that website, The Plain Truth Today message board. I really highly recommend that people go to that message board and start reading it every single day. There’s parts of The Plain Truth like Your Health Today, if you want three or four times a week is probably enough. If you don’t want to listen to these broadcasts, you don’t have to go here every day. I hope you do, but the message board is really something that you can respond to. You can put up your own news stories. If you don’t have a key, you haven’t registered with us, they’ll still go up. They just have to be monitored first, and somebody who’s monitoring the site will let your posts go through and your comments go through. You can talk and be a reporter for The Plain Truth on the message board. It’s pretty good.

29:02 Sometimes posts on the message board find their way to the main page of The Plain Truth or these broadcasts, so just think about that. That’s The Plain Truth Today’s message board that you find from theplaintruth.com. Every day you go there and you’ll find out what’s going on in the world, and then you read some of the articles we have, and I intend to do much more writing again as well when I can spare from my real job making paint, that we can show you what God is telling you and your family should do to prepare for the end times, no matter how they turn out. If we have more time to go and we can pray to God and get more time, God will show us how to do it. If we don’t and the rest of the country goes into bankruptcy, God will show you how to survive it. Or if you’re a martyr, you do have a promise that you’re going to have eternal life when you resurrect from the dead. Well, that’s the show for today. I really appreciate you all listening, and I do hope you come back tomorrow. We have shown at 7-11 in the morning, 7-11 at night, and usually my new show is at noontime. Sometimes I do short shows for the 7-11 a.m. broadcast as well.

Very seldom is a new broadcast, for me anyway, at the nighttime, but we usually put up a lot of news shows at that nighttime hour. That’s theplaintruthtoday.com, or you can get there from theplaintruth.com. Until tomorrow, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth saying thank you for listening.

We do appreciate you. Bye-bye.