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Eomund said:
Entroper it sounds good to have a gradual transition, but if you think about it this is not a good idea.
If we have at any time a federal tax on both income and consumption, the politicians will not give either of them up and the tax burden will increase to the point of economic collapse of America. The only way we can switch to the FairTax is cold turkey. Anything else is far too dangerous. I do not trust our politicians to make the right decision if both an income tax and the FairTax are working at the same time. That is too big a risk to take and if we don't go cold turkey we cannot take the risk of adding a consumption tax.

What Entroper and I were talking about is not "add some FairTax, then subtract some income tax, repeat" but rather "add some FairTax and subtract some income tax at the same time, then repeat". The total tax burden would not change (increase) at any point.

Why would this be unacceptable due to risk of "adding a consumption tax"?

I think I understand what you mean -- that we curently have NO national sales tax and that having income taxes and sales taxes at the same time would be dangerously tempting -- but it hasn't been a big problem with states AFAIK and the risk of putting the fate of the federal government -- the fate of the nation -- in the hands of an untested system is too great.

As has been discussed before, the FairTax proposes to replace 95% of current federal revenue sources, and no system like the FairTax has ever been implemented on a size and scope remotely close to this. Anything less than complete success would be disastrous.

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