Fair Tax

I sent the following as a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal regarding an editorial on the Fair Tax. We'll see if it gets published.

While I sympathize with their desire to simplify the tax code, I am mystified by the desire of the proponents of the "fair tax" to continue to promote their program with misleading arguments. It appears that they constantly try to have it both ways. For example, Leo Linkbeck, in his editorial FairTax Facts, points out early on that the cost of the income tax is "embedded" in the price of everything that you buy. By the end of the same essay though, he argues that a benefit of his tax proposal is that it would collect from the underground economy, illegal aliens, and foreign tourists. It already is though, as he pointed out, it is embedded in the price of everything you buy.