What McCarthy sold

Did Marj help him with that one?

A recent press report indicates that to win over enough support from his own party to become Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy agreed to hold a vote during this Congress on the “Fair Tax,” a plan devised years ago by the Church of Scientology to abolish the IRS and the entire federal tax system and replace it with a national sales tax that would be administered by the states. The bill would impose a 30 percent federal sales tax on everything we buy – groceries, cars, homes, health care, school tuition – and lead to a giant tax shift from the well-off to everyone else.

  ITEP

Everyone else hopefully will have already bought everything they will ever need.

The Church of Scientology’s only goal in the matter was to eliminate the agency causing it trouble, and lost interest once the IRS threw in the towel and allowed it to present itself as a church.

But by then several politicians had bought into the idea.

[...]

Five states do not impose a sales tax and every state exempts a range of purchases that would apparently be subject to the national sales tax. The bill allows the Treasury to administer the national sales tax in states that do not agree to administer it. This would suggest some sort of federal apparatus for tax collection is required, which, if you think too hard about it, sounds like it would involve something like the IRS.

[...]

Under the bill, if you buy something that costs $100 before tax, you pay $30 of national sales tax. Most of us would call that a 30 percent sales tax. Proponents, however, call it a 23 percent tax, because that $30 is 23 percent of your “gross payment” of $130, your payment including the sales tax. Proponents claim this method of calculation is more comparable to how we think about the income tax but its main result is widespread confusion.

A feature, not a bug.

It would also mean that families receiving tax credits to help pay health insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act would lose those tax credits and instead pay a new national sales tax on their premiums. The costs of the so-called Fair Tax could be even greater now for typical Americans than when ITEP warned the public about this plan years ago.

And the way the GOP will advertise it is simply that they're doing away with federal income tax.  Woohoo!

Also...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.