The as-yet-mostly-untold story of yesterday’s Iowa GOP Straw Poll in Ames is not about dueling bands and barbecues, of red inked thumbs or voting machine malfunctions; it is about tax policy. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won the coveted second-place spot over Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback on that alone.
Brownback’s record on taxes was spotless enough to inspire the Club for Growth to run negative ads against Mike Huckabee in the week leading up to the Straw Poll. He supports an “optional flat tax,” whereby citizens could opt to pay a flat income tax rate if they wanted to instead of paying income taxes based on the current system (I don’t know much more than that).
Huckabee, on the other hand, supports “FairTax,” a policy proposal that would shut down the IRS and, simplistically speaking, impose a national sales tax to pay for the federal government. There would be what they call a “pre-bate” that the government would send out to families every year to make the system a little bit less regressive, but I won’t get into the details, because they aren’t interesting. Americans for Fair Taxation actually sent me a few free copies of their book (coauthors are Rep. John Linder and controversial talker Neal Boortz), so I know more than I’m letting on.
Perhaps both of these proposals are preposterous (although an alarming number of Republican Congressmen and Senators claim to support one or the other), but policy implications took a back seat to political implications at the Straw Poll.
Something to say?
