Defend the income tax
I’ve read quite a few articles and blog posts lately that are critical of the FairTax. The common theme among them is that they identify flaws of varying degrees of significance with even wider degrees of accuracy. It is easy to disparage it if you just make things up – like in this column where the author erroneously claims that the FairTax applies to school tuition. Because the authors can identify perceived problems they relish in having dispatched the FairTax. What they typically do not do is propose their own solutions to the very real problems with our income tax system that gave birth to the FairTax. Some of these problems are inherent to a tax in income (productivity) and others are peculiar to the specific income tax system we employ. There is a term for such people: naysayers.
I think that the standard response to these naysayers should be to ask them to either respond with their own plan or, more likely, defend the income tax. Were Mike Huckabee to win the GOP nomination and I were called upon to advise his campaign that is what I would suggest he do. When his Democrat opponent predictably attacked the FairTax don’t just play defense. Ask he/she to turn towards hard working Americans and tell us why the income tax is better. Tell us why we should:
- Punish productivity, discouraging hard work
- Encourage corporations to leave our borders for friendlier tax climes
- Keep handing over detailed personal financial information to the federal government
- Keep a tax system that breeds lobbyists like a stagnant southern pond breeds mosquitoes
- Force taxpayers to give the government an interest free loan
- Let politicians keep their most powerful social engineering tool
- Have to pay others to help us then pay the government
- Make individuals spend hours of our free time every year endeavoring to comply with federal taxes
I would just love to hear Obama or Hillary try to sell the income tax to voters.
