WASHINGTON — Mike Huckabee, one of the most conservative Republicans in the 2008 presidential race, has embraced one of the most radical ideas on the campaign trail: a plan to abolish all federal income and payroll taxes and replace them with a single 23% national sales tax.
The idea -- dubbed the "fair tax" by proponents -- has been a political asset for Huckabee; its well-organized backers have helped catapult him from the back of the presidential pack to its top tier.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, January 01, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 46 words Type of Material: Correction
Huckabee and sales taxes: A Dec. 24 Section A article about Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's backing of a national sales tax said that another supporter of the plan, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), ran for his Senate seat in 2006. His Senate bid was in 2004.
Sales tax proponents have tapped into seething voter hostility toward the Internal Revenue Service to become a below-the-radar political force, popping up at campaign events and candidate forums in Iowa and elsewhere.
The efforts on Huckabee's behalf by sales tax advocates helped spur his surprise second-place showing in an August Iowa straw poll -- the breakthrough that marked the beginning of his rise in the state and nationwide.
He is the only major presidential candidate to make the idea central to his campaign. "The first thing I'd love to do as president: Put a 'going out of business' sign on the Internal Revenue Service," he said at one debate.
Some wonder, however, whether his embrace of the plan eventually could turn into a liability.
The sales tax proposal has been around for years but languished on the fringes of practical politics and policy. Tax professionals generally regard the idea as impractical, regressive and even "crackpot," as one critic puts it.
It has gone nowhere in Congress. The 2005 Presidential Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform soundly rejected the idea. And many politicians shy away from it because it is easy for opponents to portray it as a huge tax increase -- as Democrats did in a 2006 Senate race in South Carolina.
The front-runner, Republican Jim DeMint, faced an unexpectedly stiff contest because of his support for a national sales tax. "DeMint wants an extra 23% on nearly everything -- gas, food, clothing," one Democratic ad said.
DeMint responded that his position was being misrepresented, but he still suffered a sharp decline in the polls. He won in the end, but what many thought would be a cakewalk for him turned into a cliffhanger.
Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who, as head of Americans for Tax Reform, pushed candidates to take a no-tax-hike pledge, said promoting a national sales tax in the presidential election would be "political poison."
