Mitt Romney
Town Hall
Carroll, IA 12/14/07

TRANSCRIPT:
QUESTIONER: "I know that Governor Huckabee has supported the FAIR Tax. I have one follow up, do you support that or not? I understand that is a national sales and use tax.

MITT ROMNEY: Yeah, it has a lot of good elements to it. It is not part of my presidential platform and I'll tell you a couple of reasons why. One, I would like to uhh, thoroughly understand what its implications would be for seniors and for middle income folks. I do not want to raise taxes on middle income Americans. So I want to understand that thoroughly. Two, I want to get immediate action to encourage economic growth. And one of the aspects of the FAIR tax is it would require a complete restructuring of our entire tax system and probably a constitutional amendment. And as you know, getting the Democratic Congress to amend our constitution and to eliminate the income tax and then to get three-quarters of the states to do the same thing, would take a long time. So I'm instead proposing immediately we take off the tax on savings.

QUESTIONER: Uhh ok, that's good. I agree with you. The other thing, Huckabee talks about a 23 cent national sales tax. And everything I say, or read, says that 30 cents up to be revenue neutral. So I think you're right.

ROMNEY: And, uh, you know. We ought be...Truth in, Truth in lending here, as they say, is important. Which is, which is this is how they calculate the percentage. If something costs a dollar today, and you're probably, you're pretty good at math. This takes most of us a second to think about. If something costs a dollar today, after the FAIR tax, it would, a 30 cent tax would be put on top of it, which is a dollar thirty. But 30 cents is only 23% of a dollar thirty. So they call it a 23% tax. So it is either a 30% tax or a 23% tax depending on what's in the denominator. If anybody followed that, it has not been long since you were out of school."

LABEL: MR IA 12-14 (GR#16) ESA - Clip B

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