Bad Logic and... Lies by Omission?

Not that I would expect more from Tom DeLay, but shouldn't I have a right to expect more?

Our current tax system has been written by and for special interests and is, by design, dizzyingly complicated. It kills jobs, and it simply does not efficiently accomplish the tasks for which it is designed.

The American people are ready for this debate. They are ready for a debate about a flat tax that would gut the Internal Revenue Service and allow almost every American to file his or her tax return on a simple form the size of a postcard.

DeLay isn't a stupid man. He is fully aware that the issues of tax fairness and tax simplification are entirely separate - that you can have an unfair, simple tax code, and a complex but fair tax code. While he is correct that much of the complexity in the present tax code comes from catering to special interests, he is being intentionally deceptive in failing to mention that "flat tax" proposals are backed primarily by wealthy special interests seeking to lower their tax burden.

They are ready, I believe, to learn more about replacing the income-based tax system altogether with a national sales tax, as in the FairTax proposal I have co-sponsored in the House. This plan would allow Americans to choose, based on their spending decisions, how much tax they would pay every year.

Are you sufficiently deluded to believe that the average American could "choose" to avoid paying sales tax? People living paycheck-to-paycheck can suddenly curb their spending in order to "choose" to avoid taxes? If there were an honest bone in DeLay's body, he would devote at least a sentence fragment to the fact that replacing income taxes with national sales taxes would inure almost exclusively to the benefit of the wealthy, and would be exceptionally regressive. (And where is the evidence that in nations which presently employ national sales taxes and "value added taxes" that "planning and budgeting [is] easier for families and businesses"? In which of those nations is economic growth outstripping that of the United States?

Meanwhile, reforming the individual tax system would also provide a long-overdue opportunity to drain the corporate welfare, special-interest morass of our current corporate tax structure.

It would? Please, Tom - tell us how. Oh, I see... out of space.

If a flat tax is so fair, so cheap and easy to administer, and provides massive cost savings and so many efficiencies, why aren't any of the wealthy advocates of a "flat tax" for wage earners (including, of course, Tom DeLay) advocating a "flat tax" for corporate profits?