James McCusker’s Oct. 7 column, “Plan to abolish the IRS could use refinement” has some factual inaccuracies. Foremost is the claim that the Fair Tax is a product of the Church of Scientology. The group started by the Church of Scientology was called Citizens for an Alternative Tax System. This group, which is no longer in existence, did have a national sales tax proposal, but it was nowhere as sophisticated as the Fair Tax proposal and did not have the tremendous research or economic benefits of the Fair Tax.
The group that is promoting the Fair Tax is Americans for Fair Taxation. It is in no way affiliated with CATS or the Church of Scientology. The Scientology “connection” espoused by McCusker and by nationally syndicated columnist Bruce Bartlett, whom I assume is McCusker’s source, is that the founder of CATS met with Jack Trotter, an attorney close to Texas Rep. Bill Archer, the ranking Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, to discuss the sales tax idea.
As Bartlett admits, “although Trotter and Hayes held several meetings, nothing came of it. Trotter feared that the Scientology connection would turn off too many potential supporters.” Trotter founded AFT because he liked the idea of a national sales tax to replace the income tax, but did not want to have anything to do with the Scientologists.
Ken Hoagland, the communications director of Americans for Fair Taxation, said of the Scientologists, “apparently they did have a proposal, but one might as well say that the space shuttle finds its genesis in a flying fish.”
The details of the Fair Tax proposal are too great to go into here, so I would encourage your readers to visit www.fairtax.org and see for themselves this tax proposal and join over 800,000 grassroots supporters who want to make April 15 just another day.
Robert W. Richards
Abilene, Texas
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