Today we begin our series for Election 2008 in which we ask Tampa Bay: Who you voting for?
You can join in, too. Take our unscientific online survey here, and read the latest installment of who Tampa Bay is voting for after the jump:
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The best explanation of the FairTax movement and criticisms of it comes in today’s WaPo, in a story about how Mike Huckabee is riding a wave of FairTaxers with large rally audiences:
To Huckabee, there seems to be no downside to a national sales tax. By eliminating federal income and payroll taxes, businesses would save considerable sums and pass on the savings. The FairTax would lower the cost of retail goods, make U.S. companies more competitive internationally, send the economy into overdrive and even encourage thrift, since the national sales tax would apply only to new goods.
“Am I running for president to shut down the federal government? Not exactly,” Huckabee says on his Web site. “But I am running to completely eliminate all federal income and payroll taxes. And I do mean all — personal federal, corporate federal, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment. . . . Instead we will have the FairTax, a simple tax based on wealth.”
But the article goes on to detail lots of potential downsides, from the fact that FairTax shifts the tax burden from the rich to the poor, creates the largest entitlement program in the U.S. and creates an underground economy in cash transactions as a means of avoiding paying the retail tax.
The story doesn’t longer on one of my biggest points of contention with the FairTax argument: the idea that the tax preparation and advising industry (lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, etc.) and the attendant government agencies that 
administer taxes now (the IRS, mainly) would go away and free up savings now embedded in the cost of goods and services. I find it hard to believe that will occur as envisioned (lawyers and accountants drying up and blowing away? not without a fight), and I find it even harder to imagine that whatever embedded savings are freed up will be returned 100 percent to consumers. Corporations, despite the pressures of the marketplace, have many ways to keep a healthy chunk of any possible embedded savings in the form of returns to investors rather than passing them along, at least initially or for a number of years.
Here’s the FairTax rebuttal to these criticisms in general. Here’s CL’s former Atlanta political writer Doug Monroe’s 2005 piece calling FairTax a sham. Here is CL’s soon-to-be-former writer John Sugg in 2005 with an even more pointed analysis of the tax proposal and Boortz’s pimping of it.
And here’s Ron Paul’s assessment of the flat retail tax, which he says is better than the current system but only effective if the income tax is repealed.
