It is hard to pigeon-hole Mike Huckabee. The former Baptist minister doesn’t believe in evolution but he does believe in giving criminals redemptive second-chances through the many clemencies he granted as governor of Arkansas. He’s a Christian conversative, but also a populist who raised taxes to expand child health care and sought to reform his state’s education system with a plan that only liberal Democrats ended up supporting. He talks about fighting for the little guy, of not being owned by the Washington-to-Wall-Street axis of power.
Despite his history of apostasy against GOP orthodoxy as governor and his rhetoric on the campaign trail, most of Huckabee’s policy proposals are standard Republican fare. And one that is not — his strong support for a so-called Fair Tax — is both radical and anti-populist. Huckabee’s Fair Tax proposal is one of the most substative and detailed he’s offering as a presidential candidate. On his campaign web site Huckabee introduces it this way:
I’d like you to join me at the best “Going Out of Business” sale I can imagine – one held by the Internal Revenue Service. Am I running for president to shut down the federal government? Not exactly. But I am running to completely eliminate all federal income and payroll taxes. And do I mean all – personal federal, corporate federal, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment.
The Fair Tax would replace all of the above with a single flat-rate consumption tax, therefore obviating the need for the IRS. Sounds good, except when you look at the numbers and figure who would benefit and who would not. As an editorial in the Washington Post this morning spells out concisely, the “Fair Tax” is both unfair and probably unworkable, would hit middle class families hardest while providing tax cuts to the most affluent and would amount to a gift to would-be tax cheats. Other than that….