From my perspective, one of the most important fallouts from a replacement of the graduated tax with a national sales tax is the removal of much of
the current rationale for FinCEN and citizen identification (i.e., SSN). Certainly, it should no longer be required for establishing a non-credit financial institution account, purchasing a money order/cashier's check or wiring money. In fact, you shouldn't need SSN for employment, except that unless you supplied some number (even if psueduanon) you'd forego accruing benefits. The use of SSN for the ID runs the gammut in local, state and federal programs, but is most often justified for purposes of taxation. Now, I'm not naive enough to believe that any of these gov't agencies or private corps are going to willing give up citizen unit IDs, but it will be interesting to see their new rationales for the continued use of SSN (or its replacement) for ID. --Steve --Steve --------------------------------------------------------------------- reply to schear - at - lvcm - dot - com --- PGP mail preferred, see http://www.pgp.com and http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html RSA fingerprint: FE90 1A95 9DEA 8D61 812E CCA9 A44A FBA9 RSA key: http://keys.pgp.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=index&search=0x55C78B0D ---------------------------------------------------------------------