just when you think it's safe...

To give a bunch of anti-tax types some attention, they go and get batshit crazy.

I followed a FairTax link to its site and read the introductory stuff, thinking 'huh, this sounds plausible at first blush.' The equivalent of cautiously circling a huge and still smoking, but fascinating rock half-embedded in my lawn in spite of the fact that I've been burned touching those rocks before.

And then I saw as one of the benefits of the FairTax, "Abolish the IRS." Good luck with that - not even Tom Delay would've signed something making him responsible for the loss of 100,000 jobs in a single stroke. A note to the PR dep't at FairTax: Don't use words like 'abolish' when discussing huge bureacracies - it makes you sound a mite unrealistic.

Other than that, it sounds pretty good - a consumption tax with protection for the poor built in. God knows how it could actually be implemented, though. And just what is a 'prebate?'

UPDATE: Some pretty good explanations and answers in this Balloon Juice post, where my ilk prove they can be just as closed-minded and mean-spirited as the wingnuts.