Why Vilsack's FairTax Attack Ads Insult Electorate

click on graph to enlarge

 

As a follow up to the last posting re Congressman Steve King's close race in Iowa please click here to hear Steve's opponent Christi Vilsack (wife of the former Governor & current Secretary of Agriculture) display her lack of knowledge about the FairTax even after she has authorized attack after attack against Congressman King's support of the FairTax.

 

Although the above link is for an interview & not one of Vilsack's direct attack ads it does have many of the same tiresome points of the attack ads in that Vilsack claims the FairTax would be a huge burden on the middle class because it will raise the price of milk & medicine by 23% as well as farmers' prices of equipment & seed.  Vilsack ends the interview by admitting that she does not know what the prebate is.  Of course it is the prebate that ensures no American pays the FairTax on the basic necessities of life – see zero tax point on above graph.  The farmers' equipment & seed are not taxed – the FairTax taxes only the final consumer or user of goods & services meaning essentially it taxes retail sales & government consumption.  Intermediate sales from one business to another are not taxed thereby avoiding the possibility of taxing a tax like we do now.  I believe that Vilsack could also use a tutorial on the difference between the terms "tax-exclusive" & "tax-inclusive."  Wouldn't you think that someone who is going to attack something would want to know something about it before launching the attacks?

 

Steve King is more than capable of defending himself against such a person who really insults the electorate by suggesting that anyone, such as her opponent, would support such absurd positions that she presents.  There are numerous instances where this type of FairTax attack approach has backfired against the aggressive candidate who presents the nonsensical assaults.  Our biggest concern is that Steve gets the chance to set the record straight to a big enough audience who understands basic economics or really cares about anything else of substance.

 

Now virtually all politicians will stretch the truth from time to time but the last point above about really caring begs the question - what is it about the electorate that makes a candidate like Vilsack think they can get away with such gross distortions & outright lies?  The answer is found in Julie Adamen's letter to the WSJ which I present below.  Long time readers of this blog will recognize Mrs. Adamen's thoughts as point #1 from The Five Points of Citizen Control.

 

---Letter To The Editor---

 

Regarding Nick Schulz's "Hard Unemployment Truths About 'Soft' Skills" (op-ed, Sept. 20): I own and operate an employment service which has worked with dozens of small businesses in the past 15 years. We have jobs going begging for exactly the reasons mentioned by Mr. Schulz: the ability to write a coherent letter, use correct grammar while speaking, understand basic mathematics, interact well with clients and show up for work regularly.

 

The younger the applicant, the less likely he is to have these skills which older workers possess and take for granted. The less schooled young people are in the real basics of what it takes to be successful (not rich), the less likely they will be successful, and the less likely they will want to be successful—it's just "too hard." They've gone through 12 years of schooling with little homework, few hard deadlines, no points taken off a paper for spelling or grammar and a "we're all winners" attitude (I know, I have a kid in public high school), and a few more years in college taking communication courses. Add to that a generation of parents-as-friends, single-parent households, a healthy dose of short school days and some very poor teaching along the way and, voilà, you have an electorate that is incapable of understanding or caring what it takes to obtain and maintain a job, let alone the impending fiscal nightmare heading squarely at them.