Somerset Republican Times

The Fair Tax would eliminate the IRS as we know it.  Corrupt politicians and Federal employees would no longer be able to make judgements on private citizens.  Besides that, the economy would boom.                                                                                                                                                                                                        

AFFT Calls on Congress to Eliminate IRS Targeting by Enacting the FairTax(R)

May 16, 2013 10:13 | Source:Americans For Fair Taxation

HOUSTON, May 16, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Americans For Fair Taxation® (AFFT), outraged by the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) continued political abuse and intimidation of citizens and organizations, is calling on Congress to immediately enact HR 25 / S 122, the FairTax® Act of 2013 and phase out the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). "No person or group is safe from IRS targeting; everyone is a bull's eye," said AFFT spokesperson Cynthia T. Canevaro.

She added, "The agency, with over 90,000 employees and an annual budget in excess of $12 billion, has historically been the ultimate tool of extreme political manipulation by politicians of both major parties. That's exactly what our Founding Fathers feared."

"These types of abuses of are nothing new," said Dan Mastromarco, tax attorney and co-author of HR 25 / S 122. He added, "In 1819, Former Chief Justice John Marshall warned in McCulloch v. Maryland that, 'An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy.' The FairTax Act is the only way in which Congress can once and for all eliminate the harassment, political exploitation and selective enforcement against perceived dissidents. It levels the playing field and redistributes power to the citizens who pay the taxes."

The FairTax Plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with a national retail sales tax, a "prebate" to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the creation of the income tax.

"Congress has enabled IRS activities with more than 5,000 code changes in just 11 years, and even expanded their scope to include enforcement of major provisions of Obamacare," said Canevaro. "Congress created this problem. They now have an opportunity to correct it by enacting the FairTax Plan and asking the President to join them in signing the measure into law."

About Americans For Fair Taxation®

AFFT was formed in 1995. It is a nonprofit 501(c)(4), nonpartisan, grassroots organization solely dedicated to providing education on the FairTax Plan (HR 25 / S 122) to all members of the public, elected and appointed public officials and candidates for elected office – regardless of party affiliation. AFFT does not advocate the election or defeat of any candidate for public office and does not favor any candidate, political party, or incumbent over another. For more information, visit www.fairtax.org

Margaret Thatcher  1925-2013 

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"

The right to self-defense predates the Constitution.  The Second Amendment was written to guarantee it is preserved forever:

The Right to Self-Defense

by Andrew P. Napolitano

Recently by Andrew P. Napolitano: Obama’s False Alarms

In all the noise caused by the Obama administration’s direct assault on the right of every person to keep and bear arms, the essence of the issue has been drowned out. The president and his big-government colleagues want you to believe that only the government can keep you free and safe, so to them, the essence of this debate is about obedience to law.

To those who have killed innocents among us, obedience to law is the last of their thoughts. And to those who believe that the Constitution means what it says, the essence of this debate is not about the law; it is about personal liberty in a free society. It is the exercise of this particular personal liberty – the freedom to defend yourself when the police cannot or will not and the freedom to use weapons to repel tyrants if they take over the government – that the big-government crowd fears the most.

Let’s be candid: All government fears liberty. By its nature, government is the negation of liberty. God has given us freedom, and the government has taken it away. George Washington recognized this when he argued that government is not reason or eloquence but force. If the government had its way, it would have a monopoly on force.

Government compels, restrains and takes. Thomas Jefferson understood that when he wrote that our liberties are inalienable and endowed by our Creator, and the only reason we have formed governments is to engage them to protect our liberties. We enacted the Constitution as the supreme law of the land to restrain the government. Yet somewhere along the way, government got the idea that it can more easily protect the freedom of us all from the abuses of a few by curtailing the freedom of us all. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s where we are today.

The anti-Second Amendment crowd cannot point to a single incident in which curtailing the freedom of law-abiding Americans has stopped criminals or crazies from killing. It is obvious that criminals don’t care what the law says because they think they can get away with their violations of it. And those unfortunates who are deranged don’t recognize any restraint on their own behavior, as they cannot mentally distinguish right from wrong and cannot be expected to do so in the future, no matter what the law says.

When the Second Amendment was written and added to the Constitution, the use of guns in America was common. At the same time, King George III – whom we had just defeated and who was contemplating another war against us, which he would start in 1812 – no doubt ardently wished that he had stripped his colonists of their right to self-defense so as to subdue their use of violence to secede from Great Britain. That act of secession, the American Revolution, was largely successful because close to half of the colonists were armed and did not fear the use of weaponry.

If the king and the Parliament had enacted and enforced laws that told them who among the colonists owned guns or that limited the power of the colonists’ guns or the amount of ammunition they could possess, our Founding Fathers would have been hanged for treason. One of the secrets of the Revolution – one not taught in public schools today – is that the colonists actually had superior firepower to the king. The British soldiers had standard-issue muskets, which propelled a steel ball or several of them about 50 yards from the shooter. But the colonists had the long gun – sometimes called the Kentucky or the Tennessee – which propelled a single steel ball about 200 yards, nearly four times as far as the British could shoot. Is it any wonder that by Yorktown in 1781, the king and the Parliament had lost enough men and treasure to surrender?

The lesson here is that free people cannot remain free by permitting the government – even a popularly elected one that they can unelect – to take their freedoms away. The anti-freedom crowd in the government desperately wants to convey the impression that it is doing something to protect us. So it unconstitutionally and foolishly seeks, via burdensome and intrusive registration laws, laws restricting the strength of weapons and the quantity and quality of ammunition and, the latest trick, laws that impose financial liability on law-abiding manufacturers and sellers for the criminal behavior of some users, to make it so burdensome to own a gun that the ordinary folks who want one will give up their efforts to obtain one.

We cannot let ourselves fall down this slippery slope. The right to self-defense is a natural individual right that pre-exists the government. It cannot morally or constitutionally be taken away absent individual consent or due process. Kings and tyrants have taken this right away. We cannot let a popular majority take it away, for the tyranny of the majority can be as destructive to freedom as the tyranny of a madman.