I generally support the concept of the Fair Tax, though I don't really hold out any hope that our current government is capable of actually implementing it correctly. People forget that there's a huge amount of money to be saved by eliminating the income tax and the IRS fighting tax fraud and so forth. And another positive I've heard is that the government shouldn't have any right to know what any individual makes (privacy issue), and thus replacing the income tax with this system would address that.
The main argument against the Fair Tax that I've heard, is that the economy recovery has been driven by consumer spending, and by its nature the Fair Tax encourages savings at the expense of spending. However a large amount of savings is also good for the economy in other ways.
I don't necessarily buy into the idea that it'd somehow hurt the poor in some extreme fashion. They're mostly outside the tax system now and they'd remain so under this system. It's the middle-class that might get squeezed under this system, and that's why you really won't see much support for it, everyone's afraid of the ire of the middle class for some reason. Also I generally prefer that the poor (and others) be taken care of by private charities rather than government-funded (and usually horribly run) programs. And the lower-middle-class people mostly have themselves to blame for their problems (having too many children usually) and usually still live a lot better than the truly poor people in third-world nations, so I don't have much sympathy for them in general (obviously specific cases can be different).
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