Go argue with rally2xs. His exact words were "The FairTax essentially is a luxury tax"
Why? He corrected himself later. You're the one not accepting the correction over the poorly phrased attempt. Not accepting it simply means that you're now attacking a strawman.
Note: I replied to him as well, so we've nitpicked at each other a bit over it.
That's meaningless. Spending can't be "above or below the poverty line". Income can be above or below the poverty line.
Sure it can. The poverty line is defined as a dollar amount, right? Thus, if you look at annual spending, it can be above, below, or equal to that dollar amount, correct? Equal just being very unlikely because, well, what are the odds that you spend exactly $15,060 in a year? Not that you wouldn't have a number out of ~300M people. Is an individual's annual spending greater than $15,060? Then their spending is above the poverty line. Is it less? Then it's below. Simple.
Why would it be meaningless? The poverty line is determined in terms of expenses, not income. To be exact, it's 3 times the cost of the 1963 minimum food diet in modern dollars. So, you end up with $15k in modern dollars. Why would comparing an expense calculation to spending be meaningless? Seems that comparing it to income is the more meaningless measure to me.
Still has meaning though. Obviously, if you don't have savings/assets, your spending is limited to your income. Spending and Income, especially at the lower levels, are similar enough to be considered equal.
So, given that the poverty line is a commonly accepted* measure of the minimum acceptable living expense, if we're going to do the equivalent of making food sales tax free** because taxing something people need to live is considered bad, giving a rebate on that amount becomes a sort of UBI/BIG, which should reduce the amount of means-based welfare (paperwork!) we need to do. So, we give everybody $3,450 to cover the tax they pay on minimum living expenses. That way somebody living right on the edge isn't paying taxes they "can't afford", somebody living on even less is subsidized, and those living on more (crab and caviar) pay taxes. If you're only spending a little above the poverty line, you pay only a little. If you're spending a lot, then you pay a lot. Done.
So, the heart of the "Fair" tax is Universal Basic Income. Wow. Really, you should lead with that.
Probably, but it's not like I'm a proponent of fairtax, as I've said a couple times. Nor am I especially talented in this sort of stuff. I make mistakes, and you didn't say anything to make me think to lead with it. I'm mostly familiar with fairtax because I'm libertarian adjacent. IE of all the political parties, I'm closest to the libertarians, but I'm not particularly close to even them. I'm more classical libertarian than the extremist Libertarians that make up the party today.
I actually support having a UBI, though I'm nasty and only support like $6k/year, half that of most proposals. But that is because, well, given my family's history (we came from poverty), I actually know how cheaply people can live. Also, I think the higher amounts are unsustainable.
*No where near universally, but I'd argue that it's a good start.
**Though there are arguments about whether or not things like candy, soda, and really expensive foods should be included, or just "staples".