Mike Huckabee anchors his presidential bid largely on the benefits of the fair tax, a tax on consumption rather than income. The crowd at Red State Gathering responded warmly to the elimination of the IRS that would ensue.
Eliminate the IRS, get the government out of your business, while eliminating the economic incentive for illegal immigration — these are some of the benefits of implementing a consumption tax commonly called the fair tax. And GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is a sharp and passionate advocate. He drew frequent applause as he pitched the plan to Red State Gathering, a convention of conservatives this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia.
The former Arkansas governor said we need to secure our Southern border: “We can if we want to, and I want to, and I will,” he said to cheers. But he acknowledged that the economic incentive for tax-dodging individuals and businesses is the driver of illegal immigration.
“With the fair tax,” Huckabee said, “nothing is taken out of your check. And you rob out of the system the advantage of illegal immigration” because everyone pays taxes at the point of purchase.
Keeping America strong at home is impossible unless we’re also strong abroad, and Huckabee called for a vigorous, well-funded military posture.
“The best way to make sure we don’t send your sons and dauthers into war,” is to have a military strong enough so “that nobody on earth would be stupid enough to attack us. If you take on America, we will be scrambing jets and people and the world will know we will kick your butt,” he said, setting that in contrast to the slaughter of Americans in Benghazi as the military was compelled to stand down.
This also requires a revived manufacturing sector, he said. “If we don’t build our own bullets and bombs and tanks and trucks and someone else does, they own us.”
Like all of the other Republican candidates, Huckabee said the Iran deal which President Obama is currently pushing is a bad deal, and no American should sign on to it. Red State rewarded that with one of several standing ovations.
Our secretary of defense should be concerned about troops returning from deployment with missing limbs, not soldiers who was transgender surgery.
The moral decay of our government is most evident not just in the funding of Planned Parenthood, which should stop, but in the legality of the slaughter of 4,000 people a day in abortion clinics, he said. Planned Parenthood was founded by a vicious racist as a method for controlling the population of minorities, and Hillar Clinton should have to publicly defend her support of it.
“We cannot ever hope to invoke God’s blessing if we continue to rebel against the most basic decency.”
The Supreme Court (in Roe v. Wade) has put these people (babies in the womb) outside of the protection of the 5th and 14th amendments — due process and equal protection rights. “This is about the personhood of every human being,” Huckabee said, “and they should be protected by the 5th and 14th amendments and I pledge to you I will do it.”
President Obama’s changing definition of marriage is most offensive because he previously, while campaigning, said he supported traditional heterosexual marriage due to his Christian faith.
“Obama was either lying then, or lying now or the Bible got rewritten and he’s the only one who got the new version,” Huckabee said.
While he has faced criticism ranging from folks who think he’s not conservative enough to those who call him Progressive, Huckagee recounted the challenge he faced fighting “the Clinton machine” in an overwhelmingly Democratic state as governor in Arkansas. Nevertheless, he cut taxes 100 times in 10.5 years, fixed highways, reformed schools, and got reelected.
“You put my record against the headwinds I face against the Clinton machine,” Huckabee said defiantly, “I fought it, I beat it and I lived to tell about it.” A huge standing ovation drowned out the rest of his sentence.
Asked by an audience member whether a flat tax wouldn’t be preferable to a fair tax, he said ‘No’ because the llat tax is still a tax on income, still leaves the IRS in place and lets the government know what they shouldn’t about you.
As a small business person he said, “Every time I make a decision I have to call my lawyer and my accountant. I’m not making business decisions I’m making tax decisions.”
Huckabee also called for Constitutional amendments for term limits and a balanced budget through an Article V convention of the states.
He said as governor, his biggest fights weren’t against the legislature, Democrats or press, but with the federal government, which is why we need to teturn power to the states where government is closer to the people and thus more accountable.
Asked about servant leadership, he said, “The model of servant leadership is Jesus Christ. It’s not about putting attention on the leader, but on those who are being led. It starts with how we treat our own family. It’s [serving] the interest of those who are being led. Even when Jesus was being crucified, he didn’t complain but…it was ‘Father forgive them. They know not what they do.”
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