Bloomberg: ScareTax, Not FairTax, Is Name for Huckabee Plan, by Amity Shlaes:
Every presidential primary has a tax gimmick. In the 1990s, it was the flat tax. This time it’s the so- called FairTax. As far back as last summer, a FairTax Bus was rolling around Iowa. Supporting the FairTax has boosted Mike Huckabee to such an extent that Rudy Giuliani has felt the need to go around preaching the sanctity of the home mortgage- interest deduction. …
All this energy is remarkable since the FairTax is a bad idea, so bad you could call it the ScareTax. For voters to like it tells us a lot about their mood as 2008 dawns.
New York Times: The Huckabee Factor, by Zev Chafets:
The charge against him has been led by the Club for Growth, a group that promotes tax cuts and limiting government spending, which Huckabee refers to as the Club for Greed. According to Nachama Soloveichik, a spokeswoman for the Club for Growth, the governor is ‘‘a serial tax hiker and a big-government big spender.’’ …
There is some truth to the big-government, big-spender characterization, but it is also an exaggeration. As governor, Huckabee raised some taxes and lowered others and left office with a state surplus of more than $800 million. Huckabee’s answer to his opponents on the fiscal right has been his Fair Tax proposal. The idea calls for abolishing the IRS and all current federal taxes, including Social Security, Medicare and corporate and personal income taxes, and replacing them with an across-the-board 23 percent consumption tax. Governor Huckabee promises that this plan would be ‘‘like waving a magic wand, releasing us from pain and unfairness.’’
Some reputable economists think the scheme is practicable. Many others regard it as fanciful. (For starters, it would require repealing the 16th Amendment to the Constitution.) In any case, the Fair Tax proposal is based on extremely complex projections. Huckabee does not have an impressive grasp of its details. When I suggested, for example, that consumers might evade the tax simply by acquiring goods and services for cash on the black market, he seemed genuinely surprised.
