"Housing is the biggest budget item in most households,"

Houses are items for sale. New ones are Taxed. Used ones are not.

"Transportation is the next biggest item. Unless you remove the fuel tax, the biggest chunk of that expense is unlikely to be independently taxable"

Gasoline is a new item for sale at retail, so is taxable under the FairTax. Its price, due to being produced in the US, would fall about 20%, and then be taxed up to about what it was before the sales tax is instituted. Its a wash for the fuel buyer. Plus, fuel of the future is electricity, also produced in the US, and would be cheaper due to the removal of income taxes incurred in its production. Consumers, of course, have significantly more money to pay for it with because of the removal of the income taxes, both individual income tax and payroll tax, from their tax burden. Win-win for the US consumer.

"Taxes are the third biggest item. You're not going to charge a sales tax on that."

Correct. Paying taxes is not taxable under the FairTax.

"Utilities are the fourth. Also not a sale."

Utilities are water and electricity, both produced in the US, so the income taxes that are about 22% of their price would be removed due to the abolition of Federal income taxation, and then the FairTax would put the price of each back to about what it was. Again, the consumer would pay with considerable more money than he had before, due to the income taxes being removed from his personal tax burden.

"Food is next. And most attempts at creating a sales tax that isn't heinously regressive do not tax food."

Food is taxed under the FairTax, but the FairTax uses a mechanism called the "Prebate" that sends a US resident all the $$$ he needs to pay the FairTax on subsistence items up to poverty level spending. That is much better than we have now, where the income taxes take the money from the person before he even sets foot in the grocery store. Income taxes tax food, the FairTax does not, at least up to a poverty level. So, the guy existing at low income and eating beans doesn't pay FairTax, but the rich guy eating an expensive plate of truffles is going to bust out of the "poverty level" and his prebate is not going to cover the tax on the truffles, and therefore he pays the FairTax on his rich-living food tastes.

"Health care is next. Also not a sale."

Health care is a service, and taxable under the FairTax. Drugs are new items for sale at retail, and therefore taxable under the FairTax. The dodge here is that you buy health insurance, that is FairTaxed (as it would be taxed by the income tax taking its bite out of your money before you get to the insurance counter and pay for your insurance) and then paying the doctor or buying the drugs is done for you by your insurance, and becomes a busines-to-business transaction, and therefore not retail, and therefore not taxed under the FairTax. Much better than having the income taxes taxing the money you need to either pay insurance or buy drugs and doctor services yourself directly.

"So now what's left at the bottom is entertainment,
Taxable

cash donations to charity (not a sale),
Not taxable

clothing,
Taxable if bought new, not taxable if bought used in a thrift store

services,
Taxable

education (not a sale),
A special category of sale not taxable under the FairTax. It is treated as an investment in yourself. Investments are not taxable under the FairTax.

  alcohol and tobacco, and personal care.
All taxable, as they currently are under the income taxes when you pay with your income-taxed salary.

" Is there any way your 'fair tax' isn't ass about backwards?"

We're talking about a very small portion of rich people that might care to buy a very specific item, a vehicle, in, say, Italy and attempt to enjoy it without paying US sales tax on it. OTOH, big-box stores, a very small part of the economy, sells on the order of 90% of things sold in the US. Inside the store, the US goods offered for sale are going to be about 20% cheaper than they are now, while foreign things in the store stay the same price, and then the FairTax is applied. US built things return to approximately the price they are now, while foreign-built things gain 30% in tax to their price. People approach the cash register not only with their former expense of payroll tax removed, but also their individual income taxes also removed from their "withholding." IOW, the person is much more well-endowed with $$$ and the US-built stuff is about the same prices that it was before the FairTax.

New cars. $60K SUV, 1 a Jeep Grand Cherokee built in Toledo, the other an SUV built outside the country, say Mexico. Toledo-built SUV drops in price about $12K when manufacturer-incurred income taxes are removed. Foreign-built SUV remains at $60K. The FairTax is applied, the $48K Toledo-built Jeep returns to about $60K, the foreign-built $60K SUV is taxed at $18K, and becomes $78K. Everyone buys the Jeep, up to the time that the foreign manufacturer wises up and builds a factory in the US and can once again sell for $60K. The US citizen (and those legally living here) experience a serious increase in their disposable income from both the payroll tax and the individual income tax withholdings being removed, and approach the cash register with significantly more $$$ than they had before the FairTax, to buy the Jeep for the same price as it was before the FairTax. Win-win for the middle class vehicle buyer.

"Except that the bulk of things rich people buy are stocks, "

Stocks are not subject to the FairTax. FT applies to items sold at retail, and services. Stocks are investments, and are not taxed. That's a good thing, as the stocks provide money for businesses to expand and hire more people, for more money if necessary, which it would be as there would be so much activity that there would be a labor shortage, so wages would necessarily go up.

" The wealthy have homes in other countries. Why do you think they need to consume everything in the United States?"

They consume here because they live here. Yeah, they may not pay tax on a home in Brittany or Tuscany, but unless they build it themselves, IOW a NEW home, it isn't subject to FairTax anyway.

" U.S. ship is going to be more expensive."

The US-built ship will be devoid of the old income taxes and be about 20+% cheaper than it is presently. The foreign-built ship will be the same price that it was since being foreign built, it isn't charged US income taxes in its manufacture anyway. US shipbuilding will experience a dramatic growth.

" So no matter how you cut it, the U.S. ship is going to be more expensive"

Without 20+% US income tax expenses, I doubt it. I am myself unclear about a US citizen purchasing overseas. While it is true that it could be harder to detect a purchase, it may be law that the US citizen is required to pay the tax. Not sure. I've not seen this addressed in the FairTax literature and videos.

"In the real world, when costs go down, the price doesn't go down, but rather the profit margin goes up"

That is a fallacy. In the real world, producers don't set prices for things. The market sets the price. When something becomes cheaper to produce, there will be some producers that attempt to make more overall profit by lowering their prices to increase their volume, so their widget sales multiplied by their profit per widget yields the greatest overall profit. The guy that thinks he's just going to pocket the extra $$$ available will find that his widget is higher priced than his competition, he sells fewer or maybe even no widgets, and his overall profit tends toward $0.

"hurt the poor and middle class. "

Again, the truly poor, which are those spending less than the poverty level, pay $0 FairTax. The middle class buys disproportionatly in the used items markets, and that 1 yr. old smartphone bought on Ebay is devoid of FairTax as well. The fact is, that if you care to, and are careful, you can go thru life and pay exactly $0 FairTax by living frugally and buying used things. But the guy making $10K a year is sending $1530 to Washington currently, in the form of Payroll Tax, and he wouldn't be doing that under the FairTax. The poor and middle class would get a significant boost in prosperity from the FairTax.

"What a great idea. Tax the poorer people more and the rich less !"

The truly poor (living at or below the poverty level) pay $0. Pretty much everybody pays less, EXCEPT those that are currently gaming the income tax system. They would be in line for a rude awakening.

"all the things rich people just buy overseas instead isn't taxed."

Well, it is, and there's this thing called customs, that when said purchase is brought into the country, that gentleman will be there to collect that tax.

But of course the rich guy attempts to buy one big-ticket item overseas, maybe a yacht. OK, why would he do that? A yacht built by American builders would be so built without the US gov't increasing its price such that 22% of its selling price is composed of taxes incurred by its manufacture, everything from the final assembler down to the jobber that is casting plastic parts for the wastewater treatment. All those taxes, removed, make the American yacht quite a bit cheaper than the foreign one, and then the FairTax just taxes it back to equal to the foreign one. But then the American yacht is already here, while the foreign yacht would have to be sailed here, an expense, and then there's the aforementioned customs agent that makes the foreign yacht far more expensive than the American yacht.

Understanding how this luxury tax works takes some time, but it it foolproof to dramatically lower prices of US produced goods, making America dominant in the marketplace.

Pretty much all of your statements are diametrically opposed to my personal experience. You must not have been in the software industry when wages were headed over $100K until H1B workers (not immigrants, they are guest workers with no intention to stay, they just come to make (relatively meagerr) money ) and eviscerated the wage scales in the software industry. They called it the "dot.bomb." Happpened late 90's to early 2000's. Plus the idea that very little of our monies goes to buying goods and services, what is taxed by the FairTax, is again outside my experience. Lessee, today, my purchases were breakfast, insurnace (>$800 for 1/2 yr car insurance) lunch, a movie ("Civil War" which didn't make sense AND was boring so I left about an hour into it) and a few other snack food items plus the overpriced stuff at the refreshment counter at the movie. All of that gets FairTaxed. Curious how your personal spending is so different. Other expenses were the electric bill and the credit card for $4500, which pays for the month of spending for... mostly goods and services. I know the $20 haircut is in there somewhere, and gasoline, etc. The vast majority of my spending is goods and services. I don't even have any installment loans at the moment - those are NOT taxed by the FairTax. The $4500 for the credit card payment itself would not be taxed, but all the purchases I made to make the credit card bill that amount would have been taxed.

But anyway, I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote. Have a nice day.

"Let's try taxing the mega-rich first."

We keep trying that with income taxes and it keeps not working. The really rich know how to hang onto their money. According to those that know, there are trillions of dollars held abroad for the express purpose of avoiding US income tax that would come back and be invested in the USA if it would not be income-taxed. The USA could do with some hefty investment sans things like capital gains taxes (which are also income taxes that would be abolished with the demise of the 16th Amendment.)

And, one more time, the FairTax is a luxury tax. Who do you think is going to be paying big-time for a luxury tax? Donald Trump's 757 retails around 100 million, he got it used from an airline so presumably 50 million, and the FairTax would send 15 million to the US treasury for just his single purchase. Think that's his only bauble? Then there's Bill Gates 600 million dollar yacht. That'd be 180 million to the US Treasury. Sound good so far?

The real big-time is that the FairTax spreads things out so about twice as may people are paying, not just 150 - 160 million paycheck earners. EVERYBODY that spends pays, even the playboys with no jobs to tax and are spending "old money." Everything above a person's or family's poverty-level gets taxed, which is what makes it a luxury tax. Taxes are on new items for sale at retail and services. Joe blow buys a used car, then no tax. You buy a used (existing) house, no fairtax. Its just the people that are living higher than most that pay.

Politicians mouth that we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem when talking about the budget deficit.

Well, I don't think so. We have a revenue problem caused by the race to the bottom of wage scales facilitated by both legal (H1B) and illegal aliens driving down the wage scale, Businesses who must hire are very happy, but such folks in near-slave-wage conditions cannot be taxed for sufficient monies needed to run the country.

And decent salaries plus US income taxes yields products too expensive to sell.

The cure, of course, is to repeal the 16th Amendment, abolishing the income taxes, and replace them with a consumption tax, namely the luxury tax known as the FairTax and described in 131 pages by US congress' HB25. Relieving US business of a tax that comprises approximately 22% of the selling price of most good produced in the USA would make such goods more than competitive, enriching both businessmen and employees, and thus boost the tax revenues enough to fix the deficit and start paying down the debt.

So, this is something that is probably an either-or, either we find ways to raise more revenue, or the US economy eventually crashes and burns under the burden of massive, unmanageable debt. The income taxes have had their chance and failed miserably to provide the revenues required to avert disaster. I think we should abolish them and try something else before it is too late.

Hopefully, it disallowed advertising internet speeds "up to" 1000 Mbs, and only deliver 80, and still be in compliance but woefully misleading. Mine is that way, and I've never seen 80, it's less than that too.

Do we get the fantasy that I pay for, 1000 Mbps, or the measured download that I get that has never exceeded 80 Mbps? Will the FCC provide consequences for such fantasies?

Yeah, I had a geothermal heat pump in Virginia. Geothermal is the gold standard of energy savings for heating. Unfortunately, heating isn't the priority here in Texas, cooling is. The geo doesn't perform as dramatically in AC mode as it does in heat mode because the OTHER air conditioners are also heat pumps, just not in heat exchange mode with the subsurface soil. They heat exchange with colder air than my geo in Virginia that was exchanging with 40 to 50'ish degree underground soil. Texas and the rest of the south doesn't have the dramatic options for heat that the northern states do.

"Maybe if you actually had higher energy prices you'd build better houses,"

Well, no, "we" wouldn't, as I've done as much as I can afford. I'm sitting in a manufactured home (double-wide) because the barmdominium, with it's reputation of being super-insulated as a construction feature (I'm reading further and beginning to doubt that) was simply beyond my ability to pay for it. I got slightly less of a payment instead of a lot less because I included things like the highest R-value insulation that they make, with 2 X 6 timbers rather than 2 X 4's,and insulation to fill those voids. I bought too much house, really, as I had a money pit of a house previously, and spent $30K putting in geothermal heat / cool in Virginia, along with another $100K or so of various upgrades, actually beyond the ability for energy savings to pay for it. I had intended to die there except for other factors that made moving to Texas instead a good idea. Now instead of fighting near-zero degrees in the winter, I get to fight 105 degrees every day from about mid-July to mid-September.

The garage is getting no insulation because 1) the really effective spray-foam would cost me probably around the aforementioned $15K. 2) I won't be using the garage that much, I'm no longer an automotive sort that works on the car because he likes it. I'm the sort that installs my ham radio into it because I can, and paying someone else would be silly, and also installing equipment for road rallying, namely a dedicated time - speed - distance dedicated rally computer that needs the information about the wheels turning via pulses from magnets on a half-shaft and hall effect devices on a mount close to them.}

But I'm not your greenie doomsloth stating that the world is going to burn to a cinder next week if we don't spend gazillions of dollars insulating ever space we may walk through it our lives. I'm simply a money saver. For this garage, saving money is a $5500, 5-ton air conditioner that SHOULD cool the space on the rare occasion that I really have to get out there and install another antenna for my radios or similar. The $5500 is fairly outrageously wasteful considering how rarely I'll use it. But a garage to get stuff done is something I've always wanted, and this is what I can pay for. It won't waste much electricity because I'll be lucky to use it maybe 15 days out of the entire year, and some of those days will be using the heating side of it, as it will come with a set of 15 KW heating elements.

But the double-wide has a heat pump, which is the best I can do. Geothermal heat pump doesn't make sense here in Texas, because it is mostly for super efficient (cheap) heating, which is much more rarely needed than in my Virginia locale. The air conditioner functionality of my geothermal system in Virginia saw electric bills of about $140 tops for air conditioning with it, while actual, conventional air conditioners that came before it would do the same thing for $30 more than that. Hard to make $30 justify much of an additional expense for energy reduction.

But I'm not your average greenie, just someone who hates to pay utility bills, like fellow Texan George W. Bush, who also has a really, really energy efficient house for the same reason, $$$.

As for subsidies, America needs to quit doing that or we will crash and burn economically. As mentioned previously, NOT tromping thru peoples' and corporations' front doors, guns drawn, and leaving with gobs of their money that doesn't belong to the government via the vile and evil mechanism of income taxes, and replacing them with totally voluntary but easy-to-pay consumption taxes would give people far more $$$ to buy far more insulation than they can now. IOW, nuking income taxes would be a green thing. I'm all for it.

Well, no, payments on $15K of insulation at a lucky to find 6% over 15 years would be spending $126.58 in payments to save $75 in electricity. Plus the fact that I'm 76 and would be highly unlikely to survive long enough to approach any savings would just be a cost savings to America that I would get to pay for and which would impact my quality of life by about an extra $50 per month for 15 years. "Maybe" the gov't would pay for the whole thing, which would not help our deficit spending problem. The whole idea can turn into a lose-lose situation for all if attention to consequences is not given.

Note that due to embedded taxes in US manufactured goods of about 22%, those things produced in the US will fall in price by about that much. Then, they get taxed back up to about the same price they were before. You might have to "buy American" to get away with not paying more for your purchases. And of course if you're getting Social Security, I'm retired and that _is_ taxed, at least mine is. That tax would go away under the FairTax. And, regardless of your other tax status, you STILL get a monthly check from the gov't to ensure that spending on your basic subsistence remains untaxed. IOW, the gov't pays for that by sending you a check to do so.

It's the least abusive tax that one can conceive of.

"I've also heard that there's some existing mines that were left idle years ago because competition with China,"

How about US income taxes that comprise about 22% of the price of anything produced in America making competing with China a losing proposition. Cure? Abolish the income taxes by passing the FairTax, which 100% replaces all the income taxes - personal, corporate, capital gains, payroll, self-employment, gift, estate, etc etc. with a luxury tax charged on new items for sale at retail and services sold above the poverty line. The effects of such a thing would be so dramatically positive on the economy that we would easily be able to nuke the budget deficit and start paying down the National Debt from the profits from newly opened rare earth mines (yes, those minerals are on US soil) and millions of other economic endeavors that can't be contemplated because the US income taxes strangle them out of existence before they get started. Abolish the income taxes, watch the economy roar, and solve piddling little problems like this.