At its core, The FairTax (H.R. 25) is simple, and that, in itself, is the beauty of it. It calls for the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the income tax. Additionally, every tax one can think of on the federal level would be repealed and the Internal Revenue Service would be no more. Once again responsible for taxation, the Department of the Treasury would oversee a national sales tax. The American people, now armed with every cent of their paychecks, would have the option of participating in the funding of the United States Government by voting with their wallet. The degree of their purchases at the retail level would determine their taxation, not a distant politician, and anything not purchased at the retail level would not be taxed.

This brief description is just that, brief, so I urge you to read the bill; however, if legislative speak is not for you, The FairTax Book and FairTax: The Truth are simple, quick reads that explain every facet of the bill and rebut the trivial criticisms of it. And, if you are in the mood for a laugh about the lunacy of the system we currently live under, take a moment to read the results of the experiment below.

The IRS Experiment
On September 26, 2009, I downloaded Title 26 (Internal Revenue Code) of the United States House of Representatives Code to conduct an experiment. For those of you who are curious, it is a plain text file 25 megabytes in size! That is not extraordinarily large for, say, a video (as reference, most 10-15 minute videos on the web are about this size), but for a file with nothing but plain text, this is extraordinary and not in a good way.

After downloading the file, I opened it with Microsoft Word (2007 Version). On my computer, which boasts pretty good performance, this took several minutes.

Once it finally loaded, I then formatted the document with 1" margins and Times New Roman font (12 point). This is the standard format for a college paper. Once again, it took several minutes for Word to process.

With that step complete, I ran a word count (also taking another few minutes) and got the following result:

• 19,609 pages
• 451,121 paragraphs
• 3,697,733 words

If you don't believe what you just read --which I did not at first, so I repeated the experiment-- feel free to try the process yourself using the link above, or for a shortcut, download the file I reported my results from (Word: 33.5 MB PDF: 27.6 MB).

So, I ask, did you have problems computing your taxes last year? Did you wonder why? I trust you now have an idea. Needless to say, it does not have to be this way...

In contrast to Title 26, H.R. 25 (The FairTax), brought forth by Congressman John Linder, is shockingly succinct, not to mention it is the most researched piece of legislation in the history of the Congress of the United States.

Compared to the tax code as we know it, H.R. 25 is miniscule:

• 131 pages
• 3,651 paragraphs
• 29,706 words

To compare each relative to the other, H.R. 25 is shorter by:

• 19,478 pages or 99.33%
• 447,470 paragraphs or 99.18%
• 3,668,027 words or 99.19%

Granted, these statistics are based on legislation. As we all know, though, Government is excellent at taking legislation and turning it into a regulation volume several times the size of the original bill. In the case of the income tax system, that is not a good thing...

Needless to say, compliance costs of several billion man hours and several hundred billion dollars per year required to maintain the code as currently written would be greatly reduced, and that would change the face of the United States of America. Minimizing the shear size of the tax code and its cost of compliance are only a few benefits to be reaped by the passing of H.R. 25, but they have been chosen here to illustrate the pure lunacy of our tax system and how it is handicapping the true potential of the American people.