As tax season gets into full swing, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx has introduced tax reform legislation that repeals the law requiring employers to withhold federal taxes from their employees’ pay. The Federal Tax Withholding Act of 2008 (H.R. 5175) will give working Americans freedom and flexibility in paying their taxes and will also help keep the federal government accountable to informed taxpayers.
“It’s been more than six decades since the federal government forced employers to withhold taxes from taxpayers’ wages,” Rep. Foxx said in a news release. “The idea may have sounded great as a short-term wartime law in the 1940’s, but today it disguises the reach of the federal government into the pocketbooks of millions of Americans. We must end this practice and let the sunlight reveal the true burden of federal taxes.”
Withholding was signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1943. Ostensibly a measure to help fund WWII, tax withholding became a mechanism that today allows the federal government to take ever-larger—but incremental—slices of workers’ paychecks without workers noticing the real cost of taxation.
