Purdue Exponent: Mike Huckabee: Alienating Himself in the Name of God
media mention“I’m still one who says that we can get rid of the Internal Revenue Service if we would pass the FairTax, which is a tax on consumption rather than a tax on people’s income, and move power back where the founders believed it should have been all along,” said Huckabee.
Unfortunately, this is blatantly incorrect for a variety of reasons. For one, the founders didn’t have consumption taxes, they had property taxes. Secondly, and more importantly, as evidenced by research from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), consumption taxes will only benefit the most wealthy citizens.
According to ITEP, “sales and excise taxes (consumption taxes) are very regressive. Poor families pay almost eight times more of their incomes on these taxes than the best-off families, and middle-income families pay more than five times the rate of the wealthy.”