Ken Hoagland writes in:

You might want to take a look at our website: www.fairtax.org where you will find many articles about how to figure the FairTax. The most obvious is on the left hand side of the page entitled, “The 23% tomato or the 30% tomato?” [The link takes you here–RP.]
I honestly don’t know how we can be misleading people when we are so forthright about the difference between “inclusive” and “exclusive” calculations of the tax. Why do we express it as 23%?–because the income tax that the FairTax is to replace is figured that way. We reasoned that an apples-to-apples comparison would make the most sense as long as we also told everyone that sales taxes are generally expressed differently. The moment Congress begins expressing the income tax rates (and embedded income taxes) the other way, so will we. Can you give us a little credit for trying to make this clear please?

Credit is deserved. But the fact remains that when most people hear someone talking about a 23 percent sales tax, they think about it in relation to the sales taxes they’re used to. Whether or not the intention is to mislead, people are misled–and that gives the national sales tax an artificial boost in popularity.

I may as well take this opportunity, however, to revise and extend my remarks about Bartlett’s critique of the national sales tax. I don’t mean to endorse every point Bartlett made. Whether the Scientologists played a role in the development of the concept, for example, seems to me to be irrelevant to the merits of the Fair Tax.