Frank Rich has some fun with Republican candidates’ generally pathetic economic messages:

In a state decimated by unemployment, [Romney] posed before auto plants like an incongruously well-groomed Michael Moore, vowing to fight to bring back every last lost job. His plan? He’d scrap the modest new fuel-efficiency standard passed with rare bipartisan unity in Washington last month and give Detroit a $20 billion fund for energy “research” (not to be confused, he claimed, with a bailout).

Republicans love business and they love to subsidize it. Their mistress is the free market, but when push comes to shove it’s business they’re married to. In terms of energy conservation, the Republican answer will always be to pay big companies to pretend to research energy, rather than to tax pollution enough to make the fruits of such research competitive on the energy market. If there were any hope of near-term competitiveness, the research money would come from actual investors instead of a desperate, unscientific public. Oh well!

Mike Huckabee alone made affinity for economically struggling Americans his calling card. Unfortunately, Huckanomics is more snake oil. All federal taxes would be replaced by a national sales tax that despite its Orwellian name (the Fair Tax) would shift more of the burden to middle- and low-income Americans.

Not sure that “FairTax” rises to Orwellian, in this “homeland” still living under a “Patriot Act” recently enhanced with the bipartisan “Protect America Act.” But, okay.

We’ll leave aside how the FairTax would affect America’s Hummer class and focus on the low-income Americans. In the article Rich links as substantiating the claim, we find:

Fair taxers offer … “prebates,” monthly government checks sent to every household in the United States. At the end of the year, a household’s prebates would add up to 23 percent of the poverty line for that household size. For example, a couple with two children would have received $6,297 in 2007, according to Americans for Fair Taxation. …

But according to Department of Labor data for 2006, households at every income level spend more than the poverty line. For spending beyond the poverty line, that is, over the amount that prebates cover, regression kicks back in. The average American family that makes less than $70,000 a year spends more than it earns, and a prebate wouldn’t do much to make up the difference.

Well, drat. So sorry that the proposed FairTax does not solve all problems at once! Isn’t it already kind of bad that people are spending more than they earn, including the poor? The whole idea of tax-free living up to the poverty line is to guarantee that no one is taxed into starvation—what people do after that point is up to them. If they’re already spending more than they earn, they’re already screwed.

We can’t make a policy that is going to save people that insist on spending beyond their incomes which are beyond the poverty line. Sorry, there isn’t one. What the FairTax does is make things far better for the poor that live within their means, something almost everyone did before there was MasterCard. It encourages everyone to spend less and put money in a savings account. Crazy plan!

This call to protect leveraged consumption would have been far less annoying if the Mother Jones article delivering it weren’t bracketed with a callout for Photo Essay: American Happiness and the Need to Consume. The essay is dominated, of course, by snarky photos taken at big box retailers.

Couldn’t agree more, actually! American consumerism is stupid and self destructive, especially among the poor. Maybe we should connect some liberal dots here? Maybe we should stop being obsessed with shifting enough wealth downward so that everyone can afford consumer products that don’t increase happiness on the whole? It’s not making their lives better, it’s not helping the country, and it’s killing the world.

As for the Hummer class, to complain that people buying designer trucks and 46” televisions might pay the same tax rate per consumable dollar as people buying Gulfstreams, in the context of global poverty (where they don’t have to jigger the rate upwards to include masses), is just sickening.

Get a clue, liberal movement. Consumption taxes are only way to keep the world’s surging population healthy in a world where resources are stubbornly finite.