December 26: Huckabee News Roundup

Huckabee leads in Iowa newspaper endorsements: 6 for Huckabee vs. 5 for McCain, according to the Iowa Independent.

An Oklahoma poll shows Huckabee in the lead:

Huckabee led polling of Republicans. Twenty-nine percent said they favored him in the GOP primary, followed by McCain at 17 percent and Giuliani at 12 percent.

Huckabee was the big winner and Giuliani the big loser since the Oklahoma Poll last asked voters about the presidential candidates.

Huckabee went from less than 3 percent of the vote and an approval rating below 20 percent in April to 29 percent of the vote and a 46 percent approval rating in last week's survey.

Giuliani, meanwhile, went from a 32 percent share of the vote and a 52 percent approval rating -- both tops among Republicans -- to a distant third among voters and 32 percent approval.

In a head-to-head poll for North Carolina, Rasmussen finds Huckabee with the largest lead over Hillary Clinton:

The former First Lady has a two-point edge over Mitt Romney (42% to 40%) and trails Rudy Giuliani by a statistically insignificant single percentage point (Giuliani 40% Clinton 39%).

She also trails John McCain by five (45% to 40%) and Mike Huckabee by seven (46% to 39%).

The Wall Street Journal has a good article defending the Fair Tax:

Much has been written lately about the FairTax, the proposal to replace the current federal income tax with a national retail sales tax. Unfortunately, much of it is wrong.

This country needs a spirited and wide-ranging debate about fundamental tax reform. But that debate is not advanced by misimpressions and distortions of the FairTax. Let us then clear up a few.

One assertion about the FairTax is that it began as a project of the Church of Scientology at a time when it was seeking tax-exempt status. This is false. The FairTax actually comes to us from market research conducted more than a decade ago by a handful of business leaders. Their goal was to determine what type of tax system would be most acceptable to the American public. The studies they paid for cost millions of dollars, included hard economic research by respected scholars, and were subjected to critical peer review. The result is a proposal, since introduced as legislation in Congress, now known as the FairTax.

What emerged from this research is that a national retail sales tax is a preferred method of taxation among most Americans surveyed. Another is that the tax would have significant benefits for the nation's economy.

The President's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform was assembled by the Bush administration and concluded its work a few years ago. Instead of seriously looking at the FairTax, the panel looked at a very different type of consumption tax, riddled with exemptions, and then declared that it would be too expensive and that the rate would have to be far higher than the FairTax rate.

Read the whole thing...