I hope this Washington Post writer's interpretation is wrong. It's from a blog "with a liberal slant" (their description), so maybe I should take his analysis of a conservative politician with a grain of salt. A lot of us are hoping for a little more than politics as usual this election cycle, and this sounds like anything but:
Rick Perry's campaign is now distancing him from another controversial claim in his book: That we should repeal the 16th Amendment and replace it with a “Fair Tax,” a radical idea that's still rattling around in some precincts on the right.
Perry's book, published in the fall of 2010, offered a range of policy prescriptions to deal with the problems he thinks are associated with the income tax. He proposed two alternatives: The first was to scrap the current tax code in favor of a “flat tax” to make taxation “simpler, easier to follow, and harder to manipulate.”
The second, more controversial, proposal Perry advanced in the book was to “repeal the 16th Amendment” and “then pursue an alternative model of taxation such as a national sales tax or the Fair Tax.” He called the 16th Amendment “the great milestone on the road to serfdom” because it represented “the birth of wealth redistribution in the United States.”
[. . .]
This clearly represents a distancing of Perry from his book's proposals. The campaign is declining to reaffirm his support for repeal of the 16th Amendment or for the so-called “Fair Tax” or the national sales tax. As Brian Beutler explains, these are highly regressive policies that most Republicans don't support — and as Steve Benen adds, they underscore a truly radical view of how limited the Federal government should be.
But a "radical" discussion about how limited the federal government should be is exactly what is needed. It's disheartening to think a candidate would distance himself from that topic just to have a better chance to get elected.
I prefer a flat tax over a national sales tax as a way of getting the government back to mere revenue raising rather than using the tax code to set social policy. But that's only because I'm a cynic. The "fair tax" would give us more incentive to save than to spend, and that's not bad. But it would also be a new tax and thus a shiny new toy for the politicians to play with. That doesn't mean they'll get rid of the old toys. It's much safer to demand a simplification of the existing code.
But by all means let's talk about both of them, as well as any other ideas for taming the federal beast, even "highly regressive policies that most Republicans don't support." Be serious or be quiet.
Comments
CBSNews quotes Perry spokesman Mark Miner, and says the campaign is distancing itself from the Fair Tax proposal.
In any case, Perry was an idiot when he wrote that book 9 months ago. If they repeal the 16th Amendment, the Fair Tax would be unconstitutional.
I don't disapprove of the notion of the Fair Tax, or of a VAT. One generally gets less of what one taxes. Taxing consumption, rather than taxing production would make us more competitive internationally, because effectively, we'd stop taxing our exports, and start taking our imports.
On the other hand, I support another Perry proposal even more so. I'd like to see Texas secede from the union. After Lyndon and Dubya, I don't think we can afford any more presidents from Texas.
I think we can all understand and forgive someone for denouncing something he said or wrote 10 years ago, but Perry's book has only been out nine months. If it were a baby, he'd still be nursing it.
If Mitt Romney is still getting clobbered by conservatives for what he did as a liberal governor, imagine what Democrats will do to Perry, simply by reading excerpts from his book in television commercials.