I rely pretty heavily on Milton Friedman's caution about going to a "consumption" tax becasue of the potential pitfalls, mainly the "value-added" tax feature ("VAT") which would be a disastrous complexity and opportunity for almost unlimited government intrusion into business operations. The first thing that needs to be decisively dealt with is the 16th Amendment: if it's valid, forget it, it won't be repealed. But if it could in fact be proven in court that the amendment was never ratified, then the states could begin working on nullifying an illegal and invalid "amendment."
If the 16A proved to be legally bogus, then we're back to Art I Sec 9 Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution which only allows taxation based on proportion of (state?) census, which sounds like a flat rate, but not an income tax. A tax based on proportional population based on the census could mean no income OR consumption tax - simply a tax based on proportion of population based on the census.
I rely pretty heavily on Milton Friedman's caution about going to a "consumption" tax becasue of the potential pitfalls, mainly the "value-added" tax feature ("VAT") which would be a disastrous complexity and opportunity for almost unlimited government intrusion into business operationsAs would the new Excise Tax Bureau under the Fairtax.