Marcophile: Fair tax idea has local roots

One of the nation's most talked-about books, a controversial bestseller, has a significant local connection.

The book is The Fair Tax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax & The IRS. This book about our tax system is as interesting and informative as most novels on store shelves today.

The book, by radio talk show host Neal Boortz and U.S. Congressman John Lindner, offers a detailed tax reformation, replacing the present federal income tax with a "fair tax."

Boortz, a part-time resident of Naples, who has owned property on Marco Island, wrote huge chunks of the book in his condo here.

Says Boortz, an old friend from our broadcast days in Atlanta, "The first printed copy of the fair tax book came off a printer at the Kinko's on Tamiami Trail near the Waterside Shops."

It went to the top of bestseller lists and now the paperback edition, with a 5000-word "afterword," is in its third week on the New York Times Best Seller List.

The book details the most serious tax reform plan ever devised by the private sector. It's the essence of a bill now in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 25.

In a shameless plug for the book and the fair tax idea, I want to let you know that Boortz will be signing copies at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 15, at Barnes and Noble in Waterside Shops.

Boortz airs his weekday morning radio show live from 9 a.m. to noon on 98.9 FM, WGUF, right after the Dave Elliott Show. His headquarters, technically, is in Atlanta, but he loves to originate his program from Naples and does so every chance he gets.

Enough about Boortz. Back to the fair tax idea.

The headline is that the fair tax plan, if enacted, would abolish the IRS, allowing Americans to keep the money in our paychecks and to pay taxes on what we spend rather than on what we earn.

The authors, Boortz and Lindner, said their plan would, "end the national nightmare of filing income tax returns, while enlarging the federal tax base by collecting sales tax from every retail consumer in the country.

"The fair tax would transform the fearsome bureaucracy of the IRS into a more transparent, accountable and equitable tax collection system."

As friends of Boortz and acquaintances of Lindner, we followed their efforts to do the book, to take a revolutionary idea and explain it to the rest of us, trying to anticipate the outcries of complaint from critics of the plan.

After the fact, their effort to counter critics led them to decide that one element of the plan "could have been presented with more clarity in the book — the concept of embedded taxes and of keeping 100 percent of our paychecks."

This discussion alone is worth the price of the paperback edition.

Boortz and Lindner know that a lot of Americans have a vested interest in perpetuating our current, amazingly complicated system of assessing, paying and collecting taxes. They address that, of course, but most of the book is explaining the plan to regular folks, taxed taxpayers, frustrated form filler-outers — to the rest of us, that is.

The book is a worthwhile read. Then you can phone in to Boortz's radio show and yell at him if you wish. He loves that.