Huckabee is not your man

Last night I posted Bob Novak's column about Mike Huckabee and added a couple of comments of my own. Before long there were comments from readers all of which dealt with the issue of the Fair Tax. It seems that Huckabee's pledge to work for the enactment of the Fair Tax (national sales tax which would replace the income tax) has caused a great many Fair Tax advocates to see him as their champion and to overlook his significant faults.

Mike Huckabee is not a conservative on any but a few social issues like abortion and gay marriage (just like Rudolph Giuliani is not a conservative on any but a few fiscal and national security issues). In truth Mike Huckabee is a tax and spend big government liberal. That is how he governed Arkansas and that is how he would govern the United States.

Huckabee knows that he cannot get the Republican nomination by running as a tax and spend liberal so he is pretending to be a conservative tax hawk by advocating the Fair Tax. This is absolutely worthless. He knows that a national sales tax does not have the slightest chance of being enacted within the next eight years so this is just a way for him to pay lip service to fiscal conservatism.

At this point many will assume that I am an opponent of the Fair Tax because I believe that it hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law in less than 20 years. This is not true. I love the idea of abolishing all taxes other than a national retail sales tax. I think that it would be the greatest thing to happen to this country since independence. If you want to see America enter a new era of prosperity which will make the abundance we enjoy now seem like abject poverty then bring on the Fair Tax.

However none of that changes the fact that it will not become law until the average American has been convinced of its benefits and until those average Americans are willing to demand its passage with the same fierceness as they demanded the death of the amnesty bill. And we are not anywhere near that point yet.

The Fair Tax will require a constitutional amendment which will have to make all other forms of taxation unconstitutional otherwise we will wind up with a national sales tax and an income tax and a capital gains tax and the death tax and so on. Getting that amendment out of congress and to the state legislatures is going to be damn difficult. Nearly every entrenched Washington special interest is going to be opposed to it. Every left-liberal organization in the nation is going to realize that from their perspective opposition to the Fair Tax is a hill worth dying on.

Congress itself, Republican and Democrat, will be the special interest group most in opposition because the ability to punish and reward through the tax code is their greatest power and the men and women who seek political office at that level are the kind of people whose entire lives are built around their lust for power and they will not give it up willingly.

Getting the Fair Tax enacted will be a battle of equal magnitude to the fight that was waged to bring about the election of Senators through a direct vote of the people (rather than having them selected by the state governments). It came down to the fact that a majority of the voters were willing to make that the single issue which would decide whom they voted for. It got to the point where people at the state level demanded - and got - laws passed requiring each candidate's position on the constitutional amendment to mandate direct election of senators to be printed next to their name on the ballots when they stood for election.

Mike Huckabee knows this. He knows that because the enactment of the fair tax is something that can not happen during his term of office that his pledge to support it is an empty promise. Notice that he says little or nothing about any "plan B" for what he will do if the Fair Tax fails. There is no, "well if we can't get the Fair Tax we'll eliminate the capital gains tax and the death tax and cut marginal rates". No plan which he can be held to once the national sales tax fails to be enacted.

This way he can offer tepid support to a constitutional amendment when it is introduced in the House then when it fails to make it out of the House say, "well we tried, now we have to face reality and fund the government within the existing tax code which will, unfortunately, require a tax increase".

Mike Huckabee will do far more harm than good to the Fair Tax movement by making it seem nothing more than a cynical political ploy for politicians who do not really want to do anything to change the tax code. I beg all my fellow Fair Tax advocates to see through Mike Huckabee's lies and examine the true man. He is a big government authoritarian left-liberal on all but a small handful of issues. He claims to be a conservative Christian yet he surrounds himself with theological liberals. He is described by people from Arkansas who know him and have watched him closely as he governed there as "vindictive", thin skinned", "vicious", "dishonest" and "nasty".

Is this the champion you want for your most cherished issue?