Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:39:22 PM
I have said a lot of unkind things about the FairTax.org website as they failed to reply to the questions I sent them, but I now have to say that they did finally respond. And they did apologize for the long delay in responding.
I have yet to read through it, as they did actually send a rather lengthy response, but I will be reading through it.
As the FairTax has died as a viable issue this election cycle with the end of the Huckabee campaign (especially as Huckabee seems unlikely to become a McCain running mate), I have had less interest in arguing the merits of the theory, but, since they bothered to respond, I will likely be posting at least some of their response and my take on it.
And now, to make at least a partial retraction. Apparently my questions did actually go somewhere and did not get used solely to build up a mailing list. In that accusation I have been proven wrong. Regarding many other critical things I have said, it remains to be seen.
But, I am fair, and I felt that, after giving them such a hard time, I had to let my readers know that the FairTax.org people did finally get back to me.
If you are curious, my original posts on this matter are:
For The Record
By The Way
Will FairTax.org Answer THIS Time?
My posts on the FairTax in general are as follows:
Very Brief Prologue
One Thought on the FairTax
Update
Two Old Ones (Plus Three)
Addendum
Unintended Consequences
For The Record
Definitions
And So It Starts...
By The Way
If We Must...
The Rate
The 22%*
A New Record
Shot Myself In The Foot?
Will FairTax.org Answer THIS Time?
I know this is a dead issue at the moment, but some are still pushing, so I thought it may be useful to put all of my links in one place, in case anyone is interested in the subject.
And finally, it has nothing to do with this topic, but I found this old post, "
The Euro" and it was just too amusing to let languish in my archives. So, if you visit nothing else, please check this link.
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* Something went wrong with my brain when I wrote this one. In some places I use the correct 23% "embedded" tax value, in others I use 22%. I am not certain why I made this error so consistently. It doesn't make the essay any less correct, but it is annoying when I read it now, as I have to remember that 22 and 23 both refer to the same thing.
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ADDENDUM
I notice that I continued to promise a page by page review of either "The Book" or the bill, a la Henry Hazlitt's review of Keynes in
The Failure of the "New Economics". I never got around to doing so. As soon as I had the time to undertake that project, the election heated up and other topics distracted me undertaking it.
Having read my old FairTax posts, I still think this may be a worthwhile effort sometime. So it is going back on the "to do" list. It is not a high priority, but it may get done on one of my "No News Tuesdays".
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CORRECTION OF MY CORRECTION
It has been long enough that I forgot the whole FairTax pitch. The 22% is the estimated amount of "embedded taxes" which will be eliminated by the FairTax. The 23% is the "embedded" amount of the FairTax (which works out to a 30% sales tax using more traditional calculations). It has been so long I had forgotten all these nuances.
Actually, there is a lesson here. A few months ago this all seemed so important to me, and the FairTax was a hot issue. Today, less than 6 months later, I can't even remember all the points of the argument.
Yet another argument in favor of
changing things slowly. Things which seem very important often fade away to irrelevance very quickly.
Correction: For some reason I wrote "Kant" instead of "Keynes". I don't know how I managed to confuse those two, except that both are Objectivist bogeymen. Well, it has been corrected now.