Rep. King: ‘I’m For Abolishing the IRS and the Fed. I. Tax

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said he supports “abolishing” the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the federal income tax code. He made his remarks at a pre-tax-day event on Capitol Hill with other Republicans and several conservative activists.

“I’m for real tax reform and -- you all know this and I’m not here to necessarily drive this message -- I’m for abolishing the IRS and the federal income tax code and replacing it, and you know how and what with,” said King, a member of the House Small Business Committee.

Rep. King told CNSNews.com after the event, sponsored by the Americans for Tax Reform, that abolishing the IRS makes “perfect sense.”

“Well, I’ve been on this plan for 30 years,” King told CNSNews.com. “It makes perfect sense. Not just to me but to anybody that will debate this issue and that is, the IRS is, they sap the vitality of American business.”

“When you go look at a major corporation, and they will have multiple tax lawyers hired – sometimes whole floors or whole buildings committed to, not tax avoidance but tax delay -- how do they maximize the capital they have in order to grow wealth and create jobs?” said King.

“This tax on productivity in America has got to go,” he said. “I want to change the entire tax structure in America, take the penalty off of production and out it over on the side of consumption. The more we produce, the more wealth we have. The president has got it wrong. This economy isn’t built upon who can spend the most money – it’s not a giant chain-letter with no substance underneath it. What’s tied underneath it is the new wealth that is either mined out of the earth or that comes out of the land and we value-add to that multiple times. That’s all productivity. Then we market our productivity and that’s where our nation has wealth.”

“We’ve chased our manufacturing overseas,” said King. “If we just simply go to a fair tax, a national sales tax, abolish the IRS and the Internal Revenue Code, it will give us a 28 percent marketing advantage over products that are made overseas.”

Rep. King also addressed the critics of his idea.

“The people are the other side of this argument will argue that there’s something about -- they would claim that there are tax increases to consumers,” he said. “There are not. The consumer, the worker will get 56 percent more in their pay check. The prices of the goods go down an average of 22 percent. It’s goods and services.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, also spoke at the event along with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) and others.

He said that President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress have enacted $670 billion in tax increases into law.

“Fourteen of these new taxes hit people making less than $250,000,” said Ryan, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. “Over $300 billion of those tax increases affect and hit those people making less than $250,000.”

“A promise was made, a promise was broken,” said Ryan, in reference to President Barack Obama’s oft-repeated pledge not to raise taxes of any kind on Americans making less than $250,000 a year.

The House Ways and Means Committee Republican Web site recently released a list of “tax increases totaling $670.341 billion that have been enacted into law under President Obama,” said Ryan, who also urged people to visit the site and read about the taxes that are now in the law.