The Fair Tax

Taxes don't sound like Disturbing History territory, until you learn the trail of blood and power behind them. This episode traces the entire violent history of taxation in America, from the Stamp Act riots of 1765, when Boston mobs tore apart a rich man's home and tax collectors were tarred and feathered in the streets, through the Whiskey Rebellion, where George Washington personally led nearly 13,000 troops against American citizens, to the Supreme Court case where a lawyer called the income tax communism and won.

Then comes the great backfire of 1909, when Senate conservatives proposed the 16th Amendment believing it would die in the states, and instead unleashed a taxing power that climbed from 7 percent to 94 percent within a single lifetime. Along the way you'll hear the connection almost nobody makes: how the income tax quietly bankrolled Prohibition, industrialized organized crime, and then became the only weapon that could cage Al Capone.From there the story turns to the machine we live under today.

Donald Duck propaganda films commissioned by the Treasury, the 1943 withholding scheme that means most Americans have never once held their full paycheck, a tax code no living person has read, and more than 6 billion hours of compliance paperwork burned every year. And finally, the plan that was built to kill it all. In the mid-1990s, three Houston businessmen, Leo Linbeck Jr., Jack Trotter, and Bob McNair, each pledged $1.5 million and commissioned economists from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University to design a full replacement for the income tax.

The result was the FairTax, the national retail sales tax with a monthly prebate that has been introduced in every Congress since 1999 as H.R. 25, championed by John Linder, propelled to a number one bestseller by Neal Boortz in 2005, carried into the spotlight by Mike Huckabee's 2008 campaign, and never once given a floor vote.

I break down exactly how it works, why I believe it should replace the income tax, and I give you the strongest version of the criticism too, because that's how we do things here. By the end, you'll understand the FairTax better than most of the people arguing about it, and you'll never look at your pay stub the same way again.

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Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

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