Fair tax or foul? The promise and peril of changing the way we pay for government.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Viewpoint essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

DURING THE FIRST Republican presidential debate in May, erstwhile Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain was asked about expert projections that his proposal for a national sales tax would hurt poorer Americans and involve taxation of real estate and rental property. Cain got a round of applause for shooting back, "With all due respect, your experts are dead wrong:' Although the rest of his reply avoided responding to the question, Cain's barb was the point: All discussion of the national sales tax must commence with the assertion that your interlocutor is either malicious or misinformed. Several Republican presidential candidates, 61 members of Congress, and six senators support a "Fair Tax" that would replace the income tax with a levy on retail sales. And very few of these people are lukewarm about the idea.

"Any politician or political group who claims or implies that the Fair Tax adds a 23 percent national consumption tax on top of [existing federal taxes] is either lying to you or is ignorant of the facts," activist Dale Johnson wrote recently at FairTax.org. According to one YouTube uploader, a Chris Matthews interview with a Fair Tax-supporting politician shows the MSNBC hothead is "trying to carry the water for the cause of statism with the usual distortions and fear mongering, but since he is doing so from a foundation of ignorance on the simple details of the Fair Tax, his statements come across as sad"

It's not just Fair Tax proponents but also detractors who presume their opponents are dishonest or ignorant. When I published a largely negative take on the FairTax bill H.R. 25 at reason online, several commenters disdained my assessment as insufficiently negative. "Tim, I am deeply disappointed in the shallow way you 'examined' Fairtax," wrote reader Mark Curran."Fairtax is profoundly bogus, it is very much a literal farce. Someone of your 'critical thinking skills' should have spotted this long ago. Fairtax is based not just on one absurdity, but layers of absurdity"

To be fair, the Fair Tax proposal, in all its instantiations, provides plenty of room for ignorance. In sharp contrast to the 30-word 16th Amendment of 1913 (which established Congress' authority "to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived"), H.R. 25 is 131 pages long, going into microscopic specifics about circumstances under which taxes would or would not be levied.

Supporters reasonably argue that all this verbiage is...