Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Ultimate Tax Reform Poll - Flat Tax, Fair Tax or ????

ActionAmerica.org has announced our new tax reform poll that we call the Ultimate Tax Reform Poll. We call it "Ultimate", because of what it includes that every other tax reform poll of which we are aware, does not include.

A few of weeks ago, as we were discussing the order of the options that were to appear in our soon to be released, tax reform poll, pitting the Flat Tax and Fair Tax against each other, I got to thinking about all of the site feedback that we receive from our readers, who have a variety of tax reform ideas. I realized that it would be disingenuous to post a poll that only included the Flat Tax and the Fair Tax as options, unless we had some fairly good reason to believe that those were the only options that really had any kind of public support. We didn't want our poll to be a "push poll."

So, for the first half of January of this year, ActionAmerica has been running a very broad based tax reform poll. We included every type of tax reform option that we could think of, from the Flat Tax and the Fair Tax, to unlikely candidates such as the VAT Tax and Duties and Excise Taxes. We even included an option for the strict Libertarians, who think that all tax should be voluntary. Our purpose was to either prove what we thought to be true - that the Flat Tax and the Fair Tax were the only tax reform proposals that had any legs with the public - or to find out if there were any other proposals that might have any significant amount of public support.

Well, much to our surprise, we discovered that there was a third tax reform proposal that had far more than trivial public support. In fact, it essentially tied the Flat Tax for second place in that earlier poll, coming in only one vote behind the Flat Tax and it had actually led the Flat Tax for much of the previous 24 hours. Because of this surprising development, we are including three options in our Ultimate Tax Reform Poll - the Flat Tax, the Fair Tax and Taxing the States, by apportionment (and allowing each state to collect taxes within their own borders, as they see fit, to pay the federal tax bill).

That earlier poll was more like the general election, with lots of candidates. The current poll is more like the run-off. We culled out the non-starters, with that first poll and in the process, we learned that more than a few people support an option that has not been considered in any other poll, to our knowledge. The new poll asks our visitors to now choose between just those three options that got out of the starting gate.

Take a moment to tell us what kind of tax reform you think will help all Americans. Cast your vote now, at:

http://www.ActionAmerica.org/taxreformpoll.shtml

We further encourage you to pass the word about this poll, to conservative and liberal forums and news groups and to Flat Tax and Fair Tax forums and newsgroups. Tell everyone. I know that it's tempting to tell just those who agree with you and get supporters of your view to spam the poll. But, we want supporters of all viewpoints to spam the poll. In other words, we want to give everyone a chance, so our results will be more meaningful.

Vote Now.

1 comment:

ActionAmerica said...

It has only been up for three days and our Ultimate Tax Reform Poll has taken over 760 votes, with the Fair Tax holding a commanding lead over the Flat Tax and Taxing the States.

However, the heavy volume in the opening days of the poll suggests, as we have seen in the past, that activist groups have been very active in voting. This isn't a bad thing. In fact, it indicates the level of activist support that each plan enjoys. It's clear that the Fair Tax has significantly more activist support than the Flat Tax. However, we have seen bursts of Flat Tax votes, from time to time, that indicates that the Flat Tax groups are getting the word out to their supporters, as well.

On the other hand, as the activist votes taper off and ordinary people continue to find the poll and cast their votes over the next few days, we will get a better idea of what kind of support each plan has with the general public. Furthermore, it's likely that the poll will receive a lot of such ordinary traffic, since it now rates at the top or near the top of both Google and Yahoo, for a variety of targeted keywords and phrases.

If you haven't yet voted, take a moment to do so at:

http://www.ActionAmerica.org/taxreformpoll.shtml

Click here to see the results, up to now. That page has the running totals.

When the poll is complete, we will post the final results to our Polls Page at:

http://www.ActionAmerica.org/polls/index.shtml