(if you’re a conservative, anyway). According to Rasmussen, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who was appointed to fill Ken Salazar’s seat when Sen. Salazar stepped down to become Secretary of the Interior, is polling down around 40% against two potential Republican challengers in next year’s election. The thing is, those two challengers are largely unknown in the state—they’re politicians at the city/county level.
That’s why I was interested to discover someone else has thrown his hat in the ring: Luke Korkowski. A lawyer and a small businessman—he runs his own practice, and has an MBA alongside his law degree—who has clerked for the Montana Supreme Court, he has no elective experience, but plenty of real-world experience; were Bob Beauprez or Bill Owens running, the fact that Korkowski’s never served in elected office before might be more of a problem, but no one else in the race on the Republican side has served above the local level, so that’s really not an issue. What matters more is that he has experience in actually running something in the real world, and that he’s a man of character. (You have to appreciate someone whose campaign website confesses to a traffic misdemeanor.) I don’t know him personally, but I know some of his relatives pretty well, and I can attest to this: they’re good people.
Luke Korkowski wouldn’t be the typical member of the U.S. Senate by any means, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing; I like his principles, I like what he stands for, and I like who stands with him. I’ll be pulling for him in 2010.
Oh my God. Really?
The guy who's upset about inflation taxing the poor disproportionately wants to get rid of all corporate taxes (among a number of others like capital gains) and replace them with a SALES TAX!?
So now I'm reading up on the so-called Fair Tax. It isn't quite the unreasoning lunacy I first thought it to be, but I'm far from sold, and I can definitely see where people just over the poverty line (which desperately needs to be recalculated) get really massacred in this system.
But, of course, when do they not?
I will say that I like used goods being tax-free, since that accounts for almost everything I own.
On the other hand, I can see prices jumping up 23%, no one buying anything anymore, the economy collapsing further, and the wealthy abandoning ship to places like western Europe with nice, stable, Socialist economies 🙂
As it happens, I think people who've bought the sales-tax line have, you should pardon the expression, been sold a bill of goods; I know its advocates believe they've managed to make it sufficiently progressive to avoid flattening the poor, but I don't buy it. (Truly fixing that problem would be extremely complicated, and simply give us a whole new bureaucracy, imho.)
I don't worry about the "Fair Tax," though, because I think its acolytes won't succeed in imposing it. Personally, I prefer the model Alberta implemented during my time in Canada: a flat tax on all income above the poverty line (or maybe it was 125% of the poverty line; it's been long enough ago that I don't remember precisely). Add up everything you took in, subtract x and send a chunk to the government; nice and simple, you can put it on a piece of paper, and rendered progressive by making the first block of income tax-free. Index the floor permanently to the poverty line, and then all you need is a stable mechanism for determining that, and the tax code adjusts itself.
Heck, that way, both liberals and conservatives have incentive to move the poverty line up. 🙂