On the one hand, Huckabee has managed to alienate the tax-cuts-for-the-rich crowd. Big corporations haven't invested in him. The Club for Growth has run ads calling him too liberal. He "destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas," complains old-school, right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly. And one former state GOP legislator, in an interview with AlterNet, suggests that a lot of people's feelings were hurt when Huckabee compared them to "Shi'ite Republicans": extremists who didn't understand the practical considerations of governing a state like Arkansas, with its progressive tendencies.
To boost his tax cred, candidate Huckabee has eagerly signed onto FairTax, a proposal to abolish the IRS touted by Atlanta radio host Neal Boortz and at rallies nationwide. Boortz would end the income tax. Instead you'd pay a federal sales tax, and to offset resulting problems, the government would write you checks every month. How much you get depends on the number of people are in your household. And nothing else.
The cash awards, or "prebates," are supposed to offset how hard it will be on poor people to pay more for groceries. For the middle class, it has the allure of the government paying you, instead of vice-versa, while you get to fire your accountant and throw out your paperwork, unless of course you're a store owner, in which case you become neighborhood taxman. Says Huck: "I would like April 15 to be another beautiful spring day in America."
Bruce Bartlett, an economics adviser in the Reagan administration, has accused FairTax of originating in the Church of Scientology, which has historically seen the IRS as a mortal enemy. For some time the IRS refused to honor L. Ron Hubbard's pyramid scheme as a tax-exempt religion, so his acolytes dreamed up an awfully similar plan to obliterate the agency. FairTax activists, however, maintain that the resemblance between the two plans is coincidental.
But what's important is whether FairTax itself is workable. Analysts across the political spectrum have said it isn't. Costs could far exceed the promised 23 percent sales tax, and possible side effects include instantly creating a tax-free black market for everything, screwing up important deductions and punishing older people who've paid the old way.
