Implement the Fair Tax

The only thing I see wrong with this article is, we have to implement the Fair Tax with this next President.  Every thing has to change.  See my 11 things to save America.

Source:  Washington Times

FairTax efforts popular in GOP

By Stephen Dinan
August 30, 2007

Rep. Steve King, Iowa Republican, compared the grass-roots popularity of the FairTax issue to opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens.

---

After Rep. Steve King endorsed a national retail sales tax to replace the federal income tax during his first run for Congress, his own campaign coordinator told him his candidacy was finished.

Three elections later, the Iowa Republican still stands in the vanguard of the FairTax, a tax revolution that has taken hold of the 2008 Republican presidential debate and turned from outcast to kingmaker, including aiding presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee's surprise second-place showing in this month's influential Iowa Republican presidential straw poll.

Of the major candidates on the Republican side six, including all-but-announced candidate Fred Thompson, have said they are either active supporters or would at least be willing to sign a FairTax bill if it reached their desks as president. It has popped up in the debates, and in the run-up to the Iowa straw poll it was almost impossible to attend a campaign rally, meet-and-greet or town hall and not find someone wearing a FairTax T-shirt or baseball cap.

"It's almost as popular as being opposed to amnesty," Mr. King said, comparing the tax issue to the immigration issue that has also swept Iowa this year, forcing the Republican presidential candidates to heel to activists' desire for border security.

The FairTax is the survivor from what could be called the great tax-reform debates of Republicans' time in control of Congress, having eclipsed its main rival, the flat income tax, over the past few years.

Supporters say they could abolish the income tax, the Internal Revenue Service and the April 15 paperwork headaches and replace it with a 23 percent tax on all retail sales. There are no exemptions, but the government would pay a monthly rebate to every taxpayer to make up for what is spent on essentials such as food and clothing.

But don't expect to hear a lot of push in Washington for it — supporters have taken a decidedly outside-the-Beltway approach to stirring up support, using activists in places like Iowa and early-primary states such as Florida to try to win attention in the presidential contests.

"We got there by deciding there were a few places in the country that candidates had to talk face to face with people," said Ken Hoagland, the spokesman for Americans for Fair Taxation, the nonprofit group pushing the FairTax. "We knew that people love the FairTax, and we would have very little success lobbying in Washington, so we took our message to people in the primary states and asked them to take the message to the candidates."

That's exactly how they won converts such as Mr. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who signed on in March and has become one of its most ardent supporters.

"I kept hearing about it in Iowa, and people asked me if I supported it. I then got ['The FairTax Book'], read it twice, then met with some of the people behind it to ask questions as to how it worked," he said. "The more I learned, the more devoted I became."

Not to say everyone is agreed. In a Republican presidential debate three weeks ago in Des Moines, Sen. Sam Brownback said he still favors an optional flat tax, while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said they favor tax simplification instead of a total overhaul.

"Somebody would have to show me how we're going to make that transition," Mr. Giuliani said of the FairTax. "Also, the thought that there wouldn't be an IRS with the FairTax — well, who is going to administer the sales tax? And who's going to administer the people that are exempt from the sales tax?"

Mr. Giuliani said he's read and even underlined "The FairTax Book," the standard defense of the proposal, and says it looks like a false hope to him.

FairTax supporters say he must not have read that closely because, they said, nothing is exempt under the FairTax.

"That is such a fundamental point. It's hard to understand how he could have read the book and even highlighted it, as he claimed," said Mr. Hoagland, who said Mr. Giuliani's campaign also refused his group's offer of a briefing from their economists on the FairTax.

Support has grown only slowly inside of Congress. Rep. John Linder, the Georgia Republican who leads the congressional movement and sponsors a bill to enact the FairTax, has 63 co-sponsors of the bill this year, up from 54 on his bill from 2003.

For now, it remains mostly a Republican issue, as almost none of the congressional co-sponsors are Democrats. Of the Democratic presidential field, only one candidate, former Sen. Mike Gravel, has indicated his support.

Like the immigration issue, FairTax supporters used a grass-roots strategy to force the issue onto the voters' minds and let them do the work. The Iowa Republican Party has adopted a resolution supporting it, and thousands of supporters turned out for rallies in South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.

But despite $22 million spent on economic research, 700,000 signatures on a petition backing the proposal and an e-mail list of 300,000 supporters, success is still years away, Mr. Hoagland said.

He said they need to have between 5 million and 7 million dedicated, letter-writing supporters to go up against the tax lobbyists that they would have to face in the halls of Congress, and who try to win amendments that would eat away at the FairTax.

"Until we have recruited enough citizens to shut those amendments down, we are not ready to go to the floor," he said. "Having presidential candidates embrace the FairTax is very helpful, and we would hope that someone who arrives at the White House would make this a top priority, [but] even that, we believe, would not be enough."