Is there any provision in the FairTax bill to prevent both an income tax and a sales tax?
The short answer is that there is no provision in the FairTax bill (HR 25) that would prevent having a national sales tax and the income tax. However, the FairTax legislation does three things that effectively dismantle the income tax: (1) it abolishes the IRS, (2) it repeals all statutory language having to do with taxing income and payroll (i.e., the Internal Revenue Code), and (3) it eliminates the filing of annual income tax returns to the federal government for over 140 million Americans. The 16th Amendment does not “require” an income tax, it only “allows” one, and the FairTax will have broken that egg in a million pieces. It would be extremely difficult to put that egg “back together again.” Once the FairTax is enacted it would be an extremely daunting task for Congress to make people start filing income tax returns again. There would be a public uproar. Once the American public has experienced the freedom from filing income tax returns it’s hard to imagine them tolerating going
