Ever heard the expression, "out of the frying pan and into the fire"? Well, the income tax is the frying pan and the FairTax is the fire.
Just because the FairTax is different doesn't make it better than the income tax.
Good grief - you don't even grasp what the VATs you try to present do that make them quite different from the FairTax. Talk about no substance ...
I grasp the concept of VATs and the FairTax just fine. What you don't grasp is that both are a tax on consumption, only the manner in which they are collected differ, the effect on consumption and economic growth is the same.
When you understand that, get back to me, otherwise, don't bother me.
I don't agree with your categorization of the frying pan and the fire. I believe it is more apt to say "the income tax is the frying pan and the VAT (or the flat tax - whatever that is) is the fire".
The VAT taxes in quite a different manner that the retail consmption tax since it taxes business to business transactions which can THEORETICALLY be refunded to the payer by application (and supplication, no doubt) to the government. In most countries the actual fact is that these VATs create huge bureaucracies of paperwork shuffling and fraudulent transactions along with the rest of the mandatory regulatory firepower and staffing to go along with it. IOW it is little better than the IT in either deadweight expense or complication - and those expenses are (just like under the IT) an unfunded mandate upon the taxpayer.
Even with the (so-called) refund provisions of the VAT systems a good bit of this B2B tax costs is passed forwarded being embedded and cascading forward as non-productive additional cost.
The income tax qualifies on much the same basis as the VATs with the unfunded mandates, cascading, embedded tax costs boosting prices, a horrid amount of complexity and bureaucracy as well as the ease with which the tax can be avoided.
The FairTax, being a retail consumption tax that does not tax B2B transactions, does not have these horrible downsides so I think your characterizations was incorrect as I said. If you'd like to revise it as I indicated above it would be more accurate and more honest.