Posted on 12/24/2007 7:55:05 AM PST by Alex Murphy
WASHINGTON — Mike Huckabee, one of the most conservative Republicans in the 2008 presidential race, has embraced one of the most radical ideas on the campaign trail: a plan to abolish all federal income and payroll taxes and replace them with a single 23% national sales tax.
The idea -- dubbed the "fair tax" by proponents -- has been a political asset for Huckabee; its well-organized backers have helped catapult him from the back of the presidential pack to its top tier.
Sales tax proponents have tapped into seething voter hostility toward the Internal Revenue Service to become a below-the-radar political force, popping up at campaign events and candidate forums in Iowa and elsewhere.
The efforts on Huckabee's behalf by sales tax advocates helped spur his surprise second-place showing in an August Iowa straw poll -- the breakthrough that marked the beginning of his rise in the state and nationwide.
He is the only major presidential candidate to make the idea central to his campaign. "The first thing I'd love to do as president: Put a 'going out of business' sign on the Internal Revenue Service," he said at one debate.
Some wonder, however, whether his embrace of the plan eventually could turn into a liability.
The sales tax proposal has been around for years but languished on the fringes of practical politics and policy. Tax professionals generally regard the idea as impractical, regressive and even "crackpot," as one critic puts it.
It has gone nowhere in Congress. The 2005 Presidential Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform soundly rejected the idea. And many politicians shy away from it because it is easy for opponents to portray it as a huge tax increase -- as Democrats did in a 2006 Senate race in South Carolina.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I believe that’s FT Lie #26
“We need to all get the same tax bill for the same amount,”
Agree 100%.
Yup, retirees and anyone else who has saved already-taxed money, only to be taxed on it AGAIN by the so-called Fair Tax when they spend that money at retail.
IIRC they made a lot of promises like this to the Indians. Oops.... "Native Americans". That is why we have the term " Indian Native American Giver". It refers to congress. It refers to our Federal Government.
Trust us. We're from the government and we're here to help you.
It’s a 30% national sales tax that is being proposed, NOT 23%.
When you add 30% to the price, 23% of the total paid is for tax, hence the clever misrepresentation “23% tax”.
.30/1.30 = .23
People with a state sales tax of 8%, would pay a total of 38%.
This proposed “fair” tax would cause cheating and off-shoring on a scale that we have never before seen. It would be a total unmitigated disaster.
LOL!!!!
And a very merry Christmas to you and yours!
--but "principle" is right; a "principal" is a person, so you thought you were wrong but you were mistaken because you were right...
I think I need to lie down again (or is it "lye" down?).
You're just a Fair-Tax Bigot.
Hey, it works on Romney threads.
HucksterTax taking a beating ping...
Unspinning the FairTax - We look at the numbers behind the numbers.
Thanks to FactCheck.org (includes sources)
Sure, increased costs can result in lower profits, lower wages, and higher prices, but it does not have to stop there.
Producers pay for more than just wages. There's rents, raw materials, inefficiency losses, etc. Maybe inefficient business can go belly up leaving the efficient ones to make bigger profits when shortages drive up prices. Sometimes costs can be cut by dropping quality control, extending delivery times, discounts, or by dropping add-ons such as customer service. Rents can be lowered by negotiating discounts ("it's 90% or nothing"). Same with financing costs the banks charge.
I'm telling you, there's lots of ways cost hikes get handled and no two are alike. It doesn't matter much what you and I think is likely, or even what we think makes sense. I have to care about what is-- even when we think it's unlikely or we think it's crazy.
I have a HUGE problem with people that are retired and decide they have paid their fair share and do not need to pay anymore taxes. That just crazy. You live here you use the services so you should pay. It is not like you did paid a surplus when you were working.
It just frosts me.
The government should figure out what it will cost to run the government. Divide that amount by the number of soles in the Country and send them all the very same bill. Period. Everybody should pay the same amount and people that are more industrious, talented or lucky should not have to carry the others.
Taxes should be “WRITE a check.” Not added on to this or that or deducted from salary.
Now I know this will never happened but it is highly offensive for old people to not continuing to pay for the services they get.
A pretty good analysis, although not completely fair to the fairtax. Much closer to the truth than the fairtax analysis, but they don’t take into consideration several things. There will be some cost savings to businesses that will result in the pretaxed prices coming down, but not nearly the 23% the fairtaxers have claimed. More like 5-8%. And in reality the fairtax numbers don’t assume 100% compliance since the statistics they use are based on numbers that include the non-compliance of the current system. Although the number of non-reported retail transaction is surely to increase.
The only problem with the Fair Tax system: if you get a tremendous amount of exemptions when current tax laws.
I’ll give you my example: I would have (via the FT calculator, itself—I took the test) $815 LESS purchasing power, with 2.40% LESS spending income, and I would have $586 MORE in federal taxes.
Huckabee still doesn’t understand that it is not the way we pay the tax it how much we have to pay.
It would start out at 23% and before you know it would be 24 then 25 then 26 etc.
We need to cut the size of goverment in half now, asap!!
John
On planet Zeyon maybe. But here on earth there are plenty of business' that love to make "off book" transactions with barter and/or discounts for cash. Thats now!
One collateral result would be a dramatic increase in "business" transactions....the incentive to have a wholesale transaction on something your business can use - like a refergerator, or a pickup truck or a computer - would become rampant for normal, home use, retail transactions. With retail transactions forming the total national income stream the IRS would be incented to monitor both sides of the transaction.
Under a "fair" tax system, the incentive to avoid paying the tax becomes much greater since it is, proportionally, a greater chunk of the total transaction.
>>>A retail operation which has any serious revenue at all is pretty easy to spot in a sales tax audit.<<<
This makes the assumption that the transaction hits the books....plenty of off book transactions now....many more under fair tax since the incentive is a bigger payoff.
See my previous post.
The only way to keep taxes down and government spending in control is if EVERYBODY feels the pain directly, because believe it or not you feel it indirectly in anycase.
This proposed “fair” tax would cause cheating and off-shoring on a scale that we have never before seen. It would be a total unmitigated disaster.
“You’re just a Fair-Tax Bigot.”
OK, please explain why I am wrong. Why take your vacation, or build your vacation home in California, when you can instead go to nearby Mexico or Canada and avoid a 38% tax? Remember when a luxury tax was put on yacht building? The rich simply built their yachts overseas until the tax was repealed. Under the “fair tax” it would be like that, only 100 times worse!
The fair-tax proponents are very sincere, but they are also responsible for their inability or unwillingness to foresee the obvious. The rest of us, not being lemmings, do not wish to march off the fiscal cliff with the fair-taxers.
My claim is that the combination [any combination] of pre-nrst price reductions combined with wage increases and lower effective rates will result in a net zero change in purchasing power. That's what Jorgenson said BTW.
Further, I claim that any legal participant in today's income/payroll tax system will have increased purchasing power over the income tax system. That is, they will be able to buy more under the nrst than they would if the income tax continued.
Merry Christmas AR
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