Not Buddy

 Thirty percent. There was a time when that math would have left me scratching my head. Fifty percent I could grasp, even at a relatively early age. When confronted with a fifteen percent tip, I would sometimes flinch. Once I understood that ten percent was a matter of moving a decimal point, and then taking half of that again, I could get comfortable with that. 

And somewhere in my head, I knew that thirty-three percent was one third of a quantity. Roughly. Fractions helped me, but when the suggestion made by Georgia Representative Earl “Buddy” Carter for a thirty percent sales tax gained traction in this new House Majority, the scales fell from my eyes. Under Congressman Buddy's plan, Americans would pay a thirty percent sales tax. The trade-off would be that income tax would be eliminated, and the Internal Revenue Service would be abolished. 

What could be more simple? My first response would be Turbo Tax. The obvious second answer would be "have everyone pay their fair share." This new sorcery, The Fair Tax Act by name, One of the "features" of Buddy's plan would be "prebate" checks mailed out to low-income families to soften the blow. “Nobody likes to pay taxes, or at least, I don't know anybody who does,” Buddy said in a recent office interview. “But if they are going to pay a tax, I think they would much rather pay a consumption tax as opposed to an income tax. If you don't want to pay a tax, don’t buy it. It's as simple as that,”

Simple. The argument being made here is that people will be rewarded for thrift, and those who make more money won't be punished. 

Whoops. Back up there, Buddy. "Those who make more money won't be punished?" Where is this happening? Take the hypothetical example of Elon Mush, a very clever man who has managed to buy and sell things to the point where he has been featured as "one of the world's richest humans." Mister Mush has managed to make and lose billions of dollars over the course of the past several years without paying what might best be described as "his share." Financial experts of a certain stripe will trot out the statistics that suggest that the top one percent of the US wage earners pay forty percent of the taxes. Please try and make sense of this math when you consider just over eleven percent of Americans are living below the poverty line. That one percent of big-tax payers are balanced out one the other end by one percent of Americans who are making minimum wage. These are the ones making less than sixteen thousand dollars a year. 

That thirty percent tax? That means that thirty cents of every dollar they spend on things like food and clothing would go to the federal government. Just like the thirty cents of every dollar spent by a millionaire to buy another yacht. Except that the millionaire can also afford to pay an accountant to find a clever way to buy the yacht to avoid having to pay taxes at all. 

Sorry, Buddy. No sale.