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While Republicans wait anxiously for President Trump to sign what has been hailed by the mainstream media as “the most extensive rewrite of the tax code in a generation,” former Texas Congressman Ron Paul is calling out the government for celebrating tax cuts, without actually cutting taxes.

“Once again, under the guise of ‘tax cuts,’ everyday Americans will be hammered with even HIGHER taxes,” Paul wrote on Facebook. “Sleight-of-hand and slick marketing are about the only things that governments do very well.”

Paul has been a vocal proponent for abolishing both the federal income tax and the Internal Revenue Service during his political career, and his teachings have provided a common sense base for Americans who are passionate about decreasing the size of the federal government.

During an interview in November 2008, Paul argued that even if the U.S. government was to eliminate the income tax, it wouldn’t need to replace it with anything, in order to sustain the same level of government the U.S. had in the 1990s.

“I want to abolish the income tax, but I don’t want to replace it with anything. About 45 percent of all federal revenue comes from the personal income tax. That means that about 55 percent—over half of all revenue—comes from other sources, like excise taxes, fees, and corporate taxes. We could eliminate the income tax, replace it with nothing, and still fund the same level of big government we had in the late 1990s. We don’t need to “replace” the income tax at all. I see a consumption tax as being a little better than the personal income tax, and I would vote for the Fair-Tax if it came up in the House of Representatives, but it is not my goal. We can do better.”

When it comes to the current tax bill supported by the majority of Republicans—including Paul’s son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul—Ron Paul said in November that the bill does have some “positive elements,” which include “increasing the standard deduction, creating a new family tax credit, eliminating the death tax, reducing the corporate tax rate, and lowering taxes on small businesses.”

However, the bill also has some serious flaws, the worst of which is that it adopts the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI, which Paul described as “the most insidious tax.” He noted that chained CPI increases the inflation tax, which hurts Americans because instead of taxing real wages, it taxes “the illusionary gains in income caused by inflation,” and the government then uses chained CPI “to adjust tax brackets pushes individuals into higher tax brackets over time.”

“Politicians love the inflation tax because it allows them to increase taxes without having to vote for higher rates. Instead, the Fed does the dirty work. Since their creation in 1913, the Federal Reserve and the income tax have both enabled the growth of the welfare-warfare state and the erosion of our freedom and economic well-being. The key to restoring our liberty and prosperity, as well as avoiding a major economic crisis, is reversing the great mistakes of 1913 by repealing the 16th Amendment and auditing and ending the Federal Reserve.”

As The Free Thought Project has reported, in addition to the controversy over the content included in the tax bill, there have also been questions about why Congress wanted to pass it so quickly. Earlier this month, members of the Senate reported that they received copies of the massive bill, just hours before they were expected to vote on it, and some of the pages included illegible hand-scribbled amendments in the margins.

The current tax bill will increase the U.S. National Debt by more than $1 trillion, and it will also add nearly 500 pages to the federal tax code, which stood at nearly 75,000 pages, or over 1 million words, in 2014.

“When I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing.” – Ron Paul

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