Attacks on Fair Tax Are Propaganda, Not Economic Analysis

The Coalition for Missouri’s Future, a group organized to oppose efforts to eliminate Missouri’s income tax and replace it with a more broadly-based sales tax (a.k.a., The Fair Tax), has produced a series of papers questioning the benefits of the switch. The papers — currently there are five — have been written by Brian Schmidt, the former executive director of the Missouri General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Tax Policy, who is now doing private consulting. The papers raise some interesting questions and fair points, but they cannot be considered legitimate economic analysis. If the organization who commissioned the papers wanted useful propaganda, they got it. If they wanted any type of serious economic analysis, the papers fail completely in that regard.