I (Don't) Heart Huckabee

This past Thursday, while listening to All Things Considered on NPR, I heard a mind-boggling story about Mike Huckabee's plan to replace the income tax and the IRS and the income tax with the fair tax, which would tax consumer goods rather than income.

As the story notes, this is a regressive tax which would put more of a burden on people with low incomes than on the wealthy. Furthermore, although it would dispose of the IRS, it would create two more huge bureaucracies, one to see that the tax was enforced, another to administer the rebates Huckabee proposes to offset the taxes on needed household items.

Huckabee may be likeable-even my father, a New Deal Democrat, likes him-but his ideas are all washed up.