LETTERS: CUT PERSONAL INCOME TAX ENTIRELY

To the editor:

This is in response to a July 13 Speak Out caller. I don't know where he is getting his facts, but according to the information I can gather, we could cut out the federal income tax without replacing it with any new tax. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the federal government collected $740 billion from individual income taxes in 1997. The balance of the income comes from corporate income taxes, social insurance and retirement receipts, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes and custom duties. According to the General Accounting Office, the federal government could cut $350 billion from the budget by eliminating program duplication, minimizing waste and fraud and implementing more careful results-based management.

The $350 billion currently being wasted is 50 percent of individual taxes being taken. I am sure in a $1.74 trillion budget, we could find another $350 billion that could be eliminated or saved. Some suggestions I would make are to quit funding other unneeded programs. If there were any federal employees who were displaced by the cutbacks and elimination of waste, the could easily find jobs in the private sector in our booming economy. And it should boom even more with the spending of the extra money individuals would have.

Elimination of the personal income tax does not affect the collection of Social Security and Medicaid-Medicare taxes. As a Libertarian, I would like to see this be a voluntary tax. Anyone who wanted to opt out of the system and thought he could spend his money to provide for his own future and retirement should be allowed to do so. The thing I object to is taxes of force. I realize we have to have taxes to cover necessary government expenditures. But much of government spending is not really necessary, and individual income taxes are taking money, by force, from the person who worked and earned it.

MARY NALL

Marble Hill