Smugglers for Huckabee

Jerry Bowyer, WSJ OpEd on Fair Tax Flaws:

I mention this because last week Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucus partly on a movement incubated in large part on radio talk shows: the FairTax. If words were deeds, then life would be great. We could simply declare that by switching from a federal income tax to a national retail sales tax, tax cheating would end, code complexity would be a thing of the past, and illegal immigrants would start paying taxes. And, of course, we'd switch into high economic growth -- forever.

The problem is that none of this would happen. People would simply switch from cheating on income taxes to cheating on sales taxes. [snip]

Look at cigarettes. Organized crime sells smokes on the black market in jurisdictions that impose high cigarette taxes. There is a large category of economic activity designed to avoid sales taxes -- it's called smuggling. We don't hear that word much anymore, because we're not a sales-tax or tariff-based system anymore.

Smugglers for Huckabee. A flawed tax collector for his welfare state.

P.S. Giving Boomers pause:

What about Roth IRAs? I pay income taxes on the money now, and then pay again later when I spend it during retirement? Double taxation isn't really a "fair" tax, is it?

UDPATE: Dick Armey on Huckabee's tax and spend record in Arkansas and his abandoning the party's core premise of smaller government and individual freedom, the key to the virtue valued by Reagan and social conservatives:

With his jokes and folksy patter, he presents himself as affable and friendly, but only by sowing discontent and disunity can he hope to split off enough of the party's base to win the nomination. Yes, despite the sunny rhetoric, Huckabee's act is little more than another strategic political ploy.

Thus, he has worked to make his small-minded populism a credit by pitting his socially conservative supporters against the GOP's business wing. One of his favorite lines is that he represents the interests of "Main Street, not Wall Street." But this assumes that the interests of the two are not in alignment, that somehow, one group can only gain at the expense of the other - never mind that the jobs and livelihoods of America's workers and small towns are tied inexorably with the larger economy. It's a dark form of class warfare shrewdly masked by his sunny chatter.

Previous post: Hope is not enough