The IRS: Not Going Anywhere

Grover Norquist doesn’t seem to mind the FairTax, but I think his description of the way it transforms, rather than obliterates, bureaucracy is sharp:

The retail sales tax will do many things for you. Aboloshing the IRS is not one of them. It will go to a flat rate tax. It will exempt savings. Those are both very good, very powerful pro-economic growth things but if you’re taking 20 percent of GDP, 20 percent of the economy away from people and giving it to the government there is no polite, cheerful non-intrusive privacy respecting way to do that. Instead of having the IRS looking at your pay stubs, you’ll have the IRS standing around the back doors of Wal Mart making sure people don’t sell stuff out the back door. You need a similiarly sized police state to collect the sales tax as the income, Yes there won’t be an IRS. It’ll be called the Sales Tax Compliant Police.

No one seriously disagrees that the FairTax would drastically alter the way taxes are collected in the U.S., but the idea that it would do away with the IRS without the need for any federal tax collection agency to replace it is pretty absurd.