Fair Tax Is A Force

The as-yet-mostly-untold story of yesterday’s Iowa GOP Straw Poll in Ames is not about dueling bands and barbecues, of red inked thumbs or voting machine malfunctions; it is about tax policy. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won the coveted second-place spot over Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback on that alone.Brownback’s record on taxes was spotless enough to inspire the Club for Growth to run negative ads against Mike Huckabee in the week leading up to the Straw Poll. He supports an “optional flat tax,” whereby citizens could opt to pay a flat income tax rate if they wanted to instead of paying income taxes based on the current system (I don’t know much more than that).Huckabee, on the other hand, supports “FairTax,” a policy proposal that would shut down the IRS and, simplistically speaking, impose a national sales tax to pay for the federal government. There would be what they call a “pre-bate” that the government would send out to families every year to make the system a little bit less regressive, but I won’t get into the details, because they aren’t interesting. Americans for Fair Taxation actually sent me a few free copies of their book (coauthors are Rep. John Linder and controversial talker Neal Boortz), so I know more than I’m letting on.Perhaps both of these proposals are preposterous (although an alarming number of Republican Congressmen and Senators claim to support one or the other), but policy implications took a back seat to political implications at the Straw Poll.FairTax is backed by a powerful circle of donors and the well-organized group Americans for Fair Taxation, who actually bused over 500 FairTax supporters in for the Straw Poll. The rumor is that they overwhelmingly voted for Huckabee even though a few other Republican candidates (most notably, Tancredo) also support the policy. Huckabee edged out Brownback by less than 400.Although the Club for Growth ran hit pieces against Huckabee, neither they nor any other pro-flat tax group brought anyone in for Brownback. Though the flat taxers’ TV ads probably cost about as much as the roughly $150,000 the FairTax supporters spent in Ames (Americans for Fair Taxation could not actually give money to the Iowa GOP because of their tax status, so members of their group had to give private donations to pay for tent space and other privileges), the money did not pay off.So, in what I consider to be the most interesting GOP in-fighting of the day on Saturday, FairTax won and the Club for Growth (and other flat taxers) lost.Read more at Iowa Independent here and here.