True, but what you are missing is that the FairTax leadership in Congress is very aware of just that point and they are not going to allow the 16th to survive.
Here’s what they are planning right now:
1. Pass the FairTax but do not enact it until the 16th is repealed. This puts pressure on Congress and States to repeal the 16th.
2. FairTax leaders are now meeting regularly with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a bipartison organization of state legislators, to ‘memorialize’ Congress for drafting a Constitutional Convention for the sole and exclusive purpose of repealing the 16th. Only 34 states are needed to memorialize Congress and then Congress has to do it. The last I heard they have a high number of states willing.
The danger with enacting the FairTax without repealing the 16th is that people will get complacent and think that the unapportioned Income tax is gone and there’s no pressure to repeal the 16th amendment that no one is using anyways.
But in the future all it takes is one class warfare argument to soak the rich and Congress will resuscitate the unapportioned Income tax and then 15-20 years later the cancer will have spread again. That’s the way it happened in 1913 and since that year the Income Tax Code has had five major reforms, each time trying to drive this cancer into remission. It is the 16th that is the root of the cancer. It will always come back to make society sick until another reform provides relief.
The reason the FairTax was not implemented in 1913 is because it was technologically unfeasible but that is not the case now.
So yes you are right the 16th must absolutely be wiped out without a hope of ever returning. The good news is that the FairTax leadership is working that issue daily.
Repealing an Amendment is much more difficult and time consuming than passing a law. Lawmakers are basically lazy. You do the math.
The FairTax is just another kind of cancer.