Any House Republican who backs this bill can accurately be accused of voting for the following things: raising the price of everything by a huge amount at a time when inflation is already high; shifting more of the tax burden to the middle class; instituting a large new wealth tax on senior citizens; increasing federal spending by a massive amount; increasing the deficit; and creating large black markets.
It should be pretty easy to see how the bill would shift the tax burden from high earners to the middle class. It holds poor people harmless by sending everyone a “prebate” to cover taxes on all purchases up to the poverty line, and it substantially reduces the taxation of returns to investment. If the bill achieves its goal of raising the same amount of money as the current tax system, it has to increase taxes on the middle class. (And that’s even before considering how much states and localities would raise tax rates once they found that everything they bought was 30 percent more expensive.) It almost certainly would fall far short of that, but the middle-class share of taxes paid would still go up.
Senior citizens would find that the real value of their savings had dropped by about 30 percent. Having paid taxes on their income throughout their working lives, they would now also be paying taxes when they spend that income in retirement.
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