Fairtax: an exchange.(Letter to the editor)

With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had never mentioned the connection between the FairTax and Scientology in the articles cited by Mark Hemingway ("Comes the FairTax," October 8). The FairTax would still be a crackpot idea even if Scientologists had never had anything to do with it.

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It is not that there is anything inherently wrong with wanting to get rid of income taxation and collect the government's revenue by taxing consumption instead. That idea has a long and distinguished pedigree and is probably shared by most public-finance economists today.

The problem is the FairTax itself. You simply cannot collect all the government's revenue at a single point--retail sales. The opportunities for evasion are too great. Nor can you have the states collect the federal government's revenue, for the same reason. It will be too easy for the states to be lax in their collections in order to give their citizens a tax cut at federal expense. And you cannot send out monthly rebate checks to every person in the United States with a Social Security number without creating massive opportunities for fraud--not to mention the largest entitlement program in history.

However, the biggest problem with the FairTax is that it would tax all levels of government, thus forcing tax ...