To the editor:

I find that a lot of the voting public knows very little about the “fair tax,” which is badly needed to replace the Internal Revenue Service with its loopholes and 60,000-plus pages of rules and regulations that favor the wealthy, big business, corporations, Wall Street and those who have access to loopholes that the average taxpayer doesn’t have.

This means that there will be no more withholding of your income. Your taxes will be collected when you purchase new goods. The rate of our taxes would be approximately 23 percent, which seems high, but we pay about 30 percent now. Taxes that would be eliminated under the fair tax, include the personal income tax, all federal business taxes, the inheritance tax, Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, the capital gains tax on savings and investments, the marriage penalty and alternative minimum tax.

The fair tax ends the bad idea of direct taxation of earnings, savings and investments and replaces the revenue penny for penny with a tax on retail sales. The national tax base is expanded to include the nearly $2 trillion a year of “underground” economy from millions of illegal immigrants who become taxpayers as consumers and all those who have found ways, legal and illegal, to avoid paying taxes.

The fair tax will be fought tooth and nail by members of Congress, as well as lobbyists and the Wall Street elites, who use the IRS loopholes to reduce their incomes tax.

We need a new way to pay our national taxes because the current tax system is badly broken.