National Taxpayers Union
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| Formation | 1977 |
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| Headquarters | Washington, DC, U.S. |
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Membership
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362,000 |
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Budget
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Revenue: $383,905 Expenses: $442,332 (FYE December 2013) |
| Website | www |
National Taxpayers Union (NTU) is a conservative taxpayers advocacy organization and taxpayers union in the United States, founded in 1977 by James Dale Davidson. NTU says that it is the largest and oldest grassroots taxpayer organization in the nation, with 362,000 members nationwide. It is closely affiliated with a non-profit foundation, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF). National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) is a non-partisan research and educational organization dedicated to showing Americans how taxes, government spending, and regulations affect them. The National Taxpayers Union developed a method of determining how fiscally responsible members of congress are. This scale is used to determine how likely a member of congress is to vote responsibly in terms of finances. Some determining factors included in this scale are personal for instance, how many overdrawn personal checks the congressman has in a certain amount of time. While this may seem brash, the personal finance of congress members plays an important part in the grade they are assigned. Another particularly important factor in the grade is how the congress member votes on bills that the National Taxpayers Union sees fiscally important. Essentially the grade given to the congress members determines how trustworthy they are in the eyes of the National Taxpayers Union. The scale is also designed to accept both the point of view of conservative house members who want to balance the budget and liberal house members who would rather invest in programs to build infrastructure.
The National Taxpayers Union has worked to enact constitutional limits on government taxes, spending and debt. The organization also played a role in Federal income tax indexing, so inflation no longer bumps taxpayers into higher brackets. It also worked for the passage of a Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
The NTU favors either a Flat Tax or the FairTax (a national sales tax with rebate) for the United States, as opposed to the current income tax system. The organization argues in favor of the line-item veto for the president. NTU generally opposes crop subsidies by the government (such as for sugar and ethanol). The organization's briefs and policy papers decry the federal estate tax and support deregulation. NTU also provides information on "Congressional & Executive Pay/Perks" (e.g., NTU estimates the public pensions payments for Members of Congress), and NTU has called for reforms to deny a publicly funded pension to Members of Congress convicted of a felony.
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