A President Huckabee will be a tax cutter. Below Mike Huckabee explains why he is an ardent supporter of the Fair Tax. As China begins to assert itself as an economic power the US must reform its tax system urgently if it is not to lose its preeminence as an economic super power. Failure to introduce the Fair Tax will result in Chinese supremacy within 20 years. Old approaches are a sure-fire recipe for economic decline and stagnation. This presidential election is a watershed election for the US.Economists from Boston University and the Centre for European Economic Research analysed the Fair Tax and concluded that the long term effects of the Fair Tax would reward low-income households with 26.3% more purchasing power, middle-income households with 12.4% more purchasing power, and high-income households with 5% more purchasing power.
They state "While our model is highly stylized, it suggests that the Fair Tax offers a real opportunity to improve the U.S. economy's performance and the well-being of the vast majority of Americans. -source[
Simulating the Dynamic Macroeconomic and Micro economic Effects of the Fair Tax ]Mike Huckabee statement on Fair Tax:
"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. All our hours filling out forms, all our payments for help with those forms, all our shopping bags filled with disorganized receipts, all our headaches and heartburn from tax stress will vanish. Instead we will have the Fair Tax, a simple tax based on wealth.
When the Fair Tax becomes law, it will be like waving a magic wand releasing us from pain and unfairness. The Fair Tax will replace the Internal Revenue Code with a consumption tax, like the taxes on retail sales forty-five states and the District of Columbia have now. All of us will get a monthly rebate that will reimburse us for taxes on purchases up to the poverty line, so that we're not taxed on necessities. That means people below the poverty line won't be taxed at all. We'll be taxed on what we decide to buy, not what we happen to earn. We won't be taxed on what we choose to save or the interest those savings earn. The tax will apply only to new goods, so we can reduce our taxes further by buying a used car or computer. Our current progressive tax system penalizes us for working harder and becoming more successful. As we climb the ladder, the government lurks on each rung, hungry for a bigger bite out of our earnings. The Fair Tax is also progressive, but it doesn't punish the American dream of success, or the old-fashioned virtues of hard work and thrift, it rewards and encourages them. The Fair Tax isn't intended to raise any more or less money for the federal government to spend - it is revenue neutral. Expert analyses have shown that the Fair Tax lowers the lifetime tax burden of all of us: single or married; working or retired; rich, poor or middle class.
The Fair Tax will instantly make American products 12 to 25% more competitive because the cost of those goods will no longer be inflated by corporate taxes, costs of tax compliance, and Social Security matching payments. When we buy products now, those taxes are built into the cost, so all of us pay corporate taxes indirectly on top of the personal taxes we pay directly. Compliance costs are just make-work with no real added value, yet they consume as much as 3% of our gross domestic product annually. These costs are an especially heavy burden on small businesses, which generate most of our jobs. If you buy a bottle of domestic wine, you're paying the taxes/compliance/matching payments of all the folks who produced the grapes, the wine, the bottle, the cork, the label. If you buy a bottle of French wine, the producers had their Value Added Tax rebated to them when the wine was exported. So French consumers pay those taxes, but you don't. Our current tax system puts our goods at a disadvantage both here and overseas. Other governments give their goods an advantage on the world market, an advantage estimated at 18% compared to American goods. So no matter how hard Americans work, no matter how innovative and creative we are, no matter how superior our products are, we suffer from a built-in competitive disadvantage simply because of our tax system.
A recent study by MIT found that our tax system deprives us of about $1 billion in exports annually. When you export over-priced goods as we have, you inevitably end up exporting jobs and industries as we now are. We are the square peg trying to fit into the round hole of international trade. The rest of the world isn't going to change, it's time that we do. Under the Fair Tax, American companies are far less likely to move overseas and foreign companies are far more likely to come here, hiring Americans to build and work in their new plants.
The Fair Tax encourages growth by promoting investment and capital formation. We have to scrap a 20th century tax system that is holding us back and keeping us down in the 21st century. The Fair Tax is the path to greater prosperity and job security for us and for our children".
-Mike Huckabee
