Pers Speech Aa Essay

The Fair Tax Act of 2005

Specific Purpose: To persuade my listeners to support HR25/S1025, the Fair Tax Act of

2005.

Preview Statement: Today, I will provide information about tax codes, a proposed tax reform bill, and the benefits it provides.

Introduction

I. “The amount of your earnings that the government is willing to leave in your pocket is only the amount it cannot seize without promoting an outright rebellion.” A quote from The Fair Tax Book, by Neal Boortz and John Linder, published in 2005.

II. The truth behind this quote is why I support the Fair Tax Act and hope to persuade you to do the same.

III. According to my audience analysis, you would like to hear about a tax reform bill that eliminates the withholding of federal income taxes from your paycheck, and helps the less fortunate in our society; a tax code that stops penalizing businesses, resulting in American jobs coming back to our soil, while still generating the same amount of revenue our government receives today.

IV. During the presidential debates, we heard a lot about taxes. Due to our country’s current economic crisis, including the bail out, I have been researching tax reform for months and consider this option the most important improvement our government can make.

V. Today, I will provide information about tax codes, explain the proposed tax reform bill, and the benefits it provides.

(Transition: The way taxes are collected today is very complicated and expensive so let’s take a look at why our tax code needs to be reformed.)

Body

I. I discovered information in The Fair Tax Book about the cost of compliance of the current tax code, which was calculated by the Tax Foundation.

A. In 2005, individuals, businesses, and nonprofit groups spent 6 billion hours and approximately 265 billion dollars just to comply with the income and corporate portions of our tax code.

1. Amazingly, the money spent was only half of the actual taxes paid in 2005.

2. The IRS has a yearly budget of 10 billion dollars alone.

B. Due to the structure of the income and corporate tax code, in 1995, a group of businessmen started a non-partisan, grass roots organization called Americans for Fair Taxation, also having a website at www.fairtax.org (Links to an external site.).

1. According to fairtax.org. retrieved Sept. 28, 2008, this organization spent 22 million dollars over several years on polling focus groups and challenging economists to come up with a tax code that would be revenue neutral (raise the same amount of revenue as the current system while treating everyone equitably).

2. The Fair Tax Act of 2005, also known as HR25 in the House of Representatives, and S1025 in the Senate was last introduced on March 29, 2007.

3. The title of this bill reads: A bill to promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national sales tax to be primarily administered by the States.

(Transition: Now that I have given you information about the tax code, let’s look at how the Fair Tax bill would work.)

II. According to fairtax.org, if this bill is passed, it would repeal the following:

A. Individual income taxes, the alternative minimum tax, corporate and business income taxes, capital gains, social security, Medicare, self employment, estate, and the gift tax.

B. According to two economists from Boston University, Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson, in their working paper titled, “Would the Fair Tax Raise or Lower Average and Marginal Tax Rates?”. published Dec.2005, state that every good we purchase has 22% of embedded taxes.

1. The taxes included in the price of goods are placed on raw materials used to make a product as well as corporate and employee taxes, which are all passed on to consumers.

2.