Not with the Flat Tax. That is spelled out very clearly and easily.
At least until the IRS disagree's with the business' characterization of a deduction as being allowable as a business expenditure. Then comes the expensive administrative and court battles to decide the issue.
No thanks, I'll take a basic retail sales tax system over the inevitable battles that arise of deductibility of expenditures that occur with any system in which the citizen is required to self declare his tax liability to government with tax bureacrats standing by to second guess and contest the citizen's determinations.
More gobbledygook. You have such a clear and lucid writing style, a_g.
With the exemption of business purchases from the FairTax, the problem of proving business use for deductibility is not going to be improved one bit. It might be much worse.
Or to put it in geezereze:
The resultant cost vector formulation of quasi-business equivalences shall show the potential for serious cross-tabulations into semi-personal expenditure ranges when accounting analyses are undertaken; however additional layers of provenance could indeed morph the nominally more simplistic FairTax structure into a bestial abomination.