Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.
Consumption taxes are having a moment, as they do every 20 years or so. They are never a good idea, but the current iteration, which House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised to bring to the floor, is a worse idea than usual.
Under the Fair Tax bill sponsored by Representative Buddy Carter, a Georgia Republican, all income, capital gains, estate, gift, corporate, and payroll taxes would be eliminated. They would be replaced by a flat 30 percent national sales tax on everything you buy. Even Grover Norquist, the hard-right president of Americans for Tax Reform and flat-tax advocate who famously said he wanted to shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” told Joseph Zeballos-Roig of Semafor this week that the Fair Tax bill was “a political gift to Biden and the Democrats.” Elsewhere Norquist has called it “one of the stupider ideas that have been put forward.” If the “fair tax” passed in the House it would still have no chance of becoming law, of course, because the Senate and the White House would stop it. That makes a purely symbolic House vote all upside for the Democrats.
