Professor Elam

I suggested on these pages that if a dark horse political candidate wanted to break out of the pack , the best way to do so would be to embrace real tax reform. Well guess what, read on.

Huckabee’s Under-the-Radar Tax Plan

Did Mike Huckabee have a secret weapon that enabled him to finish second to Mitt Romney in the Iowa straw poll? After all, the former Arkansas governor pulled off the rare feat of getting more votes than the number of $35 voting tickets his campaign purchased.

It appears that Mr. Huckabee benefited from being the only declared GOP candidate who has fully embraced the Fair Tax, which seeks to abolish the income and most other federal taxes in favor of a single national sales levy. The group behind the Fair Tax spent $150,000 to bus 500 voting Iowans to the straw poll site in Ames, where another 5,000 to 7,000 attendees walked through the Fair Tax group’s much-welcomed air-conditioned tent.

Mr. Huckabee took pains to plug the Fair Tax in his speech at Ames, declaring to loud applause: “We need to go to a fair tax that is so simple a seven-year-old running a lemonade stand could understand it.”

The Fair Tax has largely been ignored as an issue by a media pack that prefers to focus on abortion, gay rights and health care issues. But just as the media was forced to deal with widespread support for the flat tax pushed by Steve Forbes in 1996, so too may reporters actually have to take off their blinders and notice the noisy and well-organized Fair Tax movement.

— John Fund

(Political Diary, OpinionJournal.com © The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2007)