"You're still completely ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that the same amount of revenue has to come from somewhere, and that the proposed 23% tax on spending is just plain staggering, whether the government sends you a check for that back or not The poor are still having to float almost a quarter more spending for the month"
Good grief, were do you get this stuff?
Economists pretty much universally agree that FairTax is regressive. Where do *you* get this stuff?
The poor are maybe making $12K a year, maybe less. If they're making $10K, they're sending $1530 per year to the US Treasury.
To Social Security and Medicare, yes.
Plus, under the FairTax, the price of the AMERICAN PRODUCED food will be the same before and after the FairTax is instituted,
Realistically, no, it will not. You cannot possibly guarantee that unless you implement price controls. Further, there's really no chance that it will be the same, because the wealthy will be paying less than they are now as a portion of their income, and that difference must come from somewhere for it to be revenue neutral, which means that on average, the poor and the middle class MUST be paying more than they currently are, because that money won't just come out of nowhere.
so the poor person buys a box of Corn Flakes for $X before the FairTax, and will pay $X for that box of Corn Flakes after the FairTax, AND the gov't has sent him the $$$ to pay the FairTax on it so he's really only paying 77% of $X, while the gov't is paying the 23% of $X that is FairTax,
No, in the completely unlikely event that somehow it ends up being price-neutral (which it won't be), he would be paying 81.3% of $X (100/123), such that 81.3% of $X * 1.23 = $X.
PLUS the poor person is ALSO getting the 7.65% employee's share of the payroll tax in his paycheck on top of that, PLUS he MAY get the "employer's share" of the payroll tax too, depending on how his employer handles it. If his job is as janitor at a church, the pious folks there may just elect to give him the entire $1530 that was going to Washington before the income taxes were repealed.
The Poor person at the absolute minimum breaks even, and in all probability stands to gain a significant boost in spending power due to the FairTax.
And the people making $30,000 per year go bankrupt. Look, even conservatives are en masse against this proposal. The Conservative National Review had this to say:
“Any House Republican who backs this bill can accurately be accused of voting for raising the price of everything by a huge amount at a time when inflation is already high; shifting more of the tax burden to the middle class; instituting a large new wealth tax on senior citizens; increasing federal spending by a massive amount; increasing the deficit; and creating large black markets.”
That's right. Even U.S. conservatives are saying the same things I'm saying, and are actually even pointing out things that are too cynical for me to think of. This is a terrible idea, and economists, Liberals, Conservatives, Greens, and Libertarians alike almost universally agree with that statement. When nearly 100% of people of every political persuation think something is a bad idea and you keep saying that everyone else is wrong and you're right, it's probably a good idea to take a long hard look in the mirror and figure out what you're missing, because you're clearly missing something, and probably a lot of somethings.