What’s more than 70,000 pages long, needs hired help to understand and unfairly impacts individuals, families, and businesses across this nation? It’s called the federal tax code, and it’s time to free us all from its tangled web by enacting the long-overdue FairTax.

At 131-pages-long, the FairTax is a national sales tax on all new products sold in the United States. It replaces three-million-plus words of outdated Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code with one tax based solely on what Americans spend.

In these tough economic times, spending$265 billion and 6.1 billion hours filling out tax forms does not make common sense. Yet, that’s what citizens do each and every year. We can all agree that this amount of time and money can be better spent on growing the economy and creating jobs.

Congress can help by passing the Fair Tax Act of 2011 (H.R. 25), legislation I have backed since 2006 that will create economic peace of mind now and in generations to come.

Upon implementation, the easy-to-understand FairTax would rid us of thousands of pages of regulations and loopholes. In its place would remain a transparent national sales tax on goods and services administered primarily by the states. Federal income taxes as well as the FICA payroll tax would be eliminated, and the IRS would no longer be needed.

The FairTax protects the poor and treats everyone equally: no exemptions, no exclusions, no advantages. People would be allowed to keep their entire paycheck and spend those hard-earned dollars on ways they best suit them. On the business side of the equation, labor costs are lowered by eliminating payroll taxes, allowing companies to hire more workers.

Americans deserve to keep more of their paycheck in their wallets and bank accounts. They don’t need to be finding more dollars to send to Washington to fund big and costly government programs. That’s part of what has gotten the country into the bleak economic state it is in now.

Grim statistics headline the news - debt topping $16 trillion and unemployment at 8.1 percent, all at a time when Americans are working harder than ever to pay bills and put food on the table.

Easing these burdens will be a tough road to travel, but I am up for the hard work needed to enact true and lasting fiscal reforms, like the FairTax.

Recently, the House of Representatives made headway toward growing the economy and putting Americans back to work by passing the Job Protection and Recession Prevention Act, the Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Job Creation Act, and the Repeal ObamaCare Act.

Add the FairTax to that list, and we’ve given the nation yet another tool with which to build a solid foundation for the future. It’s a vote Congress needs to take, and I’m fighting to see that it happens sooner rather than later.

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