Food for Thought: FairTax

I know that at this point I don't really have a solid audience on this blog and therefore posing a question for debate will yield no response... But I've decided to post one here anyways.

While researching my assigned congresswoman for my Politics of Theatre class (Lucille Roybal-Allard CA-D House of Rep 34th District Downtown LA, Downey, etc) I came across a very interesting website called On The Issues:

www.ontheissues.org

This website breaks down how congresspeople vote on various issues and even has a quiz, which I'm currently working my way through quite arduously, which matches your responses, opinions, and stances on various issues with those of congresspeople up for election. I think this is pretty cool. The quiz is forcing me to think about issues I try to avoid thinking about most of the time because it's hard brain work and isn't a whole lot of fun. I realize this kind of attitude is probably detrimental to my development as a knowledgeable, responsible, and politically active constituent so maybe by sharing something cool I've found on the Internet with a faceless audience I can quasi-justify myself. Anyways, as I'm making my way through this quiz:

http://www.ontheissues.org/Quiz/Quiz2010.asp?quiz=Pres2012

I came across the issue of "Make taxes more progressive." Clicking on the issue itself takes me to an information page that spells out for me "Strongly supporting this issue means that you believe..." and other statements that are meant to help me clarify how I stand. Essentially these are pages that should be entitled "On the Issues For Dummies." The information page on this particular issue had a link to another website about a proposed tax reformation called FairTax. So I went there because I had never heard of it before:

http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=HowFairTaxWorks

In a nutshell the idea is to abolish the IRS and income tax and instead create a national sales tax that will fund all of our federal programs. The effect of simplifying the tax code and encouraging consumption is beneficial for individuals as well as businesses because people are only taxed on what they buy instead of being taxed on what they make. According to the information on their website. There is also a pre-bate program (in the sense of being opposite of a rebate or reimbursement) meant to support low-income families by allocating money to be spent on costs of living up to the poverty level to counteract the economic burden of paying tax on everyday goods.

The FairTax website makes this sound like a great idea but I'm open to hearing potential problems. Obviously this means that everything becomes more expensive due to the added tax but theoretically we earn more money because we keep our entire paycheck. As a soon-to-be-graduate this is only slightly terrifying because my future prospects of a steady substantial paycheck in the theatre and entertainment industries are slim. The FairTax website also seems to omit any plans for how each of the individual states will get their necessary funding out of this new proposed plan:

http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=grassroots_state_sites
(note that California is not listed here)...

Food for thought. What do you think?