Mike Huckabee has become the second Republican presidential candidate to vow the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service if elected in November 2016.
Like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the former Arkansas governor is pitching a radical tax reform plan that would junk the progressive system, with all of its deductions, in favor of simpler approach. Like Cruz, Huckabee said that going this route would render irrelevant the IRS or any similarly massive agency that tracks and collects federal taxes. Still, the federal government would have to collect tax revenue — and someone, or some bureaucracy, has to do it.
So how would it work in a Huckabee administration if he could convince Congress to go along? Like Cruz, Huckabee envisions some small sub-agency of the Treasury Department doing most of the work. But Cruz’s plan calls for an income-tax based “flat tax” collecting directly by Washington, whereas Huckabee is advocating a national sales tax (aka the “FairTax”) that would require state governments to do most of the heavy lifting.
“One of the best things about the FairTax is that it’s the only tax plan that abolishes the intrusive, invasive, unfair, overly complex IRS and eliminates our 75,000 page tax code,” Huckabee campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley told the Washington Examiner. “The collection of FairTax revenue would be administered at the state level by the same state agencies currently collecting sales taxes in 45 of our 50 states.”
Gidley went on to explain that the five states that don’t have a sales tax would have options for how they would participate in this scheme. They could create a state agency to collect the national sales tax; contract with an adjoining state; or let the federal government collect it directly. Either way, Gidley said, “there would be no Internal Revenue Service.”
What about the extra burden on the states, some of which barely have enough resources to take care of themselves as it is? The federal government would pay them to administer this new revenue collection program, with each state getting paid one quarter of 1 percent of what they collect on Washington’s behalf.
