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 ...
You’re certainly correct. It would be - plain and simple - still an income tax (and we’d still have the IRS with all its downside).
A flat tax would also not gain any tax revenue from the “underground economy” such as illegal aliens, drug dealers, etc. Nor would it help make our manufacturers more competitive overseas.
I’m well aware. That’s why I say we need to reverse this trend of removing people from the tax roles.
I used to be a supporter of the FairTax, if you can call 5 years of donating money to FairTax.org and defending it here on FR “support”. I always qualified my support by saying I’d much prefer it without the prebate because it perpetuates the trend to growing number of non-taxpayer voters. It only recently occurred to me that it would actually worsen the situation as compared to the current system — because lower middle class people would be relieved of the SS/M tax as well. That is the straw that broke the camel’s back. People being eligible for SS/M benefits after never having paid a dime into it.
I still think the FairTax would be a positive development if we kept SS/M as-is and eliminated the prebate. Those two changes would give us a 12% FairTax rate that would be much more palatable to people and leave SS/M taxes and benefits to be dealt with as a separate issue.
Not when the purchase is made with already taxed savings. LOL!
Get your concepts straight.
As soon as you get better at math. LOL!
In addition the FairTax rewards (not punishes)success but some folks now benefiting from the Income Tax are fighting like hell to retain it since they’ve found how (they think) to game the system.
The IRS just loves to get those types to work with.
Looks like you’re one of those who game the system and therefore fight to keep it despite teetering on the legal edge. Might I get your name and SSN to send to a friend in government service?
You should read the bill where it is explained.
Put down the crack pipe.
Might I get your name and SSN to send to a friend in government service?
You bet. My name is Mike Huckabee. Don't forget to mention all the gifts I received from lobbyists while I was governor.
You should easily be able to generate $250,000 per year and even plug some of that back into your starting capital to do very well. Not all of what you spend out of that amount will be taxed in any event - but that's up to you.
I have read the bill. I read the bill a long time ago. My questions remain. The bill does NOT address my concerns that we will not see a worse mess than the one we currently face. I’ve been hoping that FairTax proponants could address those concerns in this forum. The last time I addressed those concerns, some feeble attempts were made to insult me. At least this time around, I haven’t been flamed, yet.
Nicely said!!!
That’s why you can accumulate wealth under the FairTax if you’re reasonably frugal. Under the income tax doing so is very difficult and usually amounts to jumping through all sorts of government-controlled hoops and (it the person is so disposed) shading the law by merely ignoring it until you’re caught.
Perhaps you should do a bit of your own research so you can see this.
A $100 item today includes about $22 of taxes paid at the various levels of manufacture and passed on to the consumer. So even today, your "after tax" dollars are paying for that.
The FairTax will remove that $22, lowering the cost to $78. Add the FairTax, and the cost is back up to $100 or $101. (I've seen studies that prices could drop even more putting the new cost even lower than $100)
The purchase price of an item includes the FairTax. So a receipt for a $100 item will show that the item cost $77 and the FairTax passed on to the Govt is $23.
Calculated inclusively, like the income tax replaced by the FairTax, $23 of $100 is 23%.
Great. Prices stay the same (or drop), I keep 100% of my paycheck and I get a prebate. What's not to love about that?
Oh, yeah, the government gets the same revenues too. I'm going to use my extra money to buy a car that runs on water and a perpetual motion machine.
Don’t tell me it’s “do-able”. Clearly it isn’t.
Not when the purchase is made with already taxed savings. LOL!
I think that point was already made. You have to earn $128, which is taxed at 28%, in order to have $100 to purchase a $100 item.
My apologies, the post was intended for the poster in #437.
The “entire paycheck” you keep is roughly equivalent to your current take-home pay. Taxes currently withheld from your paycheck would not be added to your new paycheck.
28% of $128 is $35.84.
I'm interested in my savings which have already been taxed by our current, evil system. These savings will now get hit for another 30% on my future purchases.
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