Dear Charles,

Thank you for sharing your support for the Shark Conservation Act of 2009 (S. 850). It is an honor to serve as your Senator, and I appreciate hearing from you.

I, too, support the Shark Conservation Act and am a proud co-sponsor of this bill. As you know, killing sharks for their fins is a practice that threatens shark populations around the world. This legislation would strengthen the U.S. restrictions on removing shark fins by prohibiting fishing boats from trading fins at sea or bringing fins into port.

I agree with you that protecting our shark populations is crucial to maintaining a healthy ocean ecosystem, and curbing the biodiversity crisis our planet is currently facing. As a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, please know that I will work with my colleagues to advance legislation protecting endangered wildlife populations.

Thank you, again, for sharing your thoughts with me. I hope you will continue to keep me informed about the issues that matter most to you.


All my best,
Jeff Merkley
United States Senate

question for everyone that posts in here daily- how often have you written your representatives? the 'why bother it wont change anything' attitude is why our government is so broken- they run wild knowing most folks dont care long as they have phone/video game/internet forum/whatever to occupy their time...if even one in ten wrote their representatives, they would take notice...I bet sincerely right now its less than 1 in 1000. Ive written 3 letters in the last year, but posted hundreds of times in here...I just want to do 'something'...a piece of printed vinyl aint much, but ALREADY three folks at work commented on it, and one read up on it, asked me for a bumper sticker the next day. its not much, but its doing something...

Recently, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published an editorial attacking John Boozman and me for supporting the Fair Tax. The criticism mirrored that of Senator Blanche Lincoln and like most of the attacks on the fair tax, it didn't let the facts get in the way of a strong opinion to keep the status quo of the tax system. I asked to submit a guest column to thoroughly present the other side, but the idea of a guest column was rejected by the newspaper, which is their prerogative. Since they chose not to tell the other side, I will take to the forum of my website to do so and would ask that you forward the article to everyone you can, especially if you have friends in AR so they will know that Blanche Lincoln is as wrong on the Fair Tax as she was on Obamacare and the stimulus. It's apparent that she hasn't read the Fair Tax bill anymore than she read the 2300 pages of the Obamacare bill.


Guest Column----“Facts and the Fair Tax” by Mike Huckabee

It is unfortunate that you have consistently written with contempt about the Fair Tax, but have obviously done so without bothering to conduct even the most perfunctory research on what it actual does and does not do. I expect that kind of “shoot first, aim later” approach from the local tabloids, but the Democrat-Gazette editorial staff is better than your understanding of the Fair Tax would reflect.

The Fair Tax is hardly a “half-baked” idea. It is the result of over $22 million dollars of scholarly research involving economists from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, Boston University, and other prestigious universities.

In a nutshell, the Fair Tax is a flat tax, but instead of taxing our productivity (income, investment, savings, capital gains, or inheritance), we are taxed at the point of consumption at the retail level on new items. It is flat, fair, finite, and family friendly. It is totally transparent, unlike the hideous tax structure we currently have and is not a VAT that assesses taxes at production points, but remains largely hidden to the consumer.

The criticism that it would “hurt the poor” is the surest evidence that the critic is ignorant of the pre-bate built into the fair tax, which un-taxes consumption of our basic necessities, and which the studies show actually creates the greatest benefit to those in the lower third of the economy, significant benefit to the middle third of the economy, and some benefit, but less to those in the top third of the economy.

Here’s what the Fair Tax will do:

1.Eliminate the IRS and its indecipherable 67,000 pages of tax code so complex that even Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner and 41 members of the White House staff seem unable to understand it (or else simply unwilling to comply with it.)
2.Release $13 TRILLION of U. S. capital back into our economy that is presently legally, but unfortunately parked offshore to protect it from the ravenous tax rates.
3.End the nightmarish accounting and legal nightmare for small business operators (and large ones) and allow them to actually make BUSINESS decisions instead of TAX decisions.
4.Eliminate an estimated $500 Billion of expenses related to compliance with the complicated tax code that produces nothing but government paperwork.
5.Virtually eliminate the underground economy by making taxpayers out of illegals, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, gamblers, and others who work “off the books.”
6.Restore a person’s full paycheck—one will receive in many cases his or her first full paycheck with no deductions taken out.
7.Eliminate the hidden and embedded tax on all the things we purchase, which is approximately 22%.
Unfortunate and misguided or perhaps dishonest statements have been made about the Fair Tax, some of which stems from the utterly nutty critique some years ago by Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal who went so far as to try and allege that the Fair Tax was a secret plot of the Church of Scientology. Some point to a supposed study of the Fair Tax by the Bush administration, which was a consumption tax, but not one that involved the all critical pre-bate. Some simply fail to understand the power of the pre-bate for low income earners or have failed to recognize how significantly the political dynamics of Washington would change if Congress were no longer able to manipulate the tax code so as to create winners and losers according to the whims of Congress rather than to the free marketplace.

The so-called “sticker shock” of a 23% tax rate seems ominous until one realizes that with the various payroll taxes, hidden taxes in our purchases, etc., the average American already pays almost 33% in taxes now at the federal level.

The Fair Tax would be a legitimate economic stimulus package by creating a level playing field for manufacturing. When U. S. companies are having to factor in the embedded taxes on our side, but our competitors in China don’t, we have a hard time keeping our manufacturing and our jobs here.

I recommend that one read “The Fair Tax” by Congressman John Linder and Neal Boortz or the follow-up book by the same authors, “The Fair Tax Answers,” or go to fairtax.org and then at least base whatever criticism on something other than internet chatter and less than complete understanding of the facts of the Fair Tax.

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