This morning I read where Bush was talking about replacing income tax with a national sales tax. Does anybody reading this know any details?
Is this just a way of putting forth the goofy sound-bite "abolish the IRS" (who's going to collect this national sales tax of theirs, pixies?) or does one of Bush's advisers actually have a proposal?
As a guy who gets paid by the hour, the question I'm interested in first is, with this plan (if a plan actually exists) what happens to FICA and Medicare? It's sort of a tradition when the news-n-opinion media talk about Federal taxes to never never never mention FICA and Medicare. But my family is right about at the median for family incomes in the U.S.A., and when I look at my paycheck stub I see that they withhold considerably more for the Medicare flat tax, and the wildly regressive FICA tax (I pay sixty times the percentage rate as a guy with a $5-million annual income), than for income tax. And that's not counting the matching 7.65% my employer pays in my name, which, even though it doesn't appear on my paycheck stub, should probably be considered as part of my income.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net