Mike Huckabee’s advocacy of the “fair tax,” is helping his candidacy in South Carolina. Saturday Huckabee was in Charleston and according to the Charleston News many “fair tax” advocates were in his audiences.

Excerpts from the article:

• Supporters of the Fair Tax, a plan to replace the national income tax with a national sales tax, made up a good-sized chunk of the 100-plus people who crammed into a North Charleston hotel conference room to hear Huckabee.
• Charleston County GOP Chairwoman Lin Bennett, a Thompson supporter, noted that Huckabee’s position as the only front-runner who has endorsed the tax gives him a built-in base here. “These Fair Tax people, wherever you go, there are gazillions of them.”
• Huckabee discussed his nine-point plan for immigration reform, which calls for building a fence along the Mexican border by 2010, hiring more Border Patrol agents, imposing fines on employers who hire illegal immigrants, promoting immigration-law training for local police and modernizing the process of legal immigration.
• He said his proposal doesn’t include amnesty and would give those here illegally 120 days to leave the country and apply to return through legal means. Those who don’t leave would be deported and have to wait 10 years to legally return. “It’s not to be harsh but rather it’s to be fair to all,” he said.
• Huckabee said he believes his poll numbers have risen recently for several reasons, including his debate performances and a few extended televised interviews. He said martial arts star Chuck Norris’ endorsement helped, noting that almost every television network ran Norris’ endorsement spot.

From The Charleston Post and Courier, “It’s Still Anyone’s Primary,” written by Robert Behre

A recent Washington Post editorial “Mr. Giuliani and the Tax Fairy,” ridicules Rudolph Giuliani’s often repeated claim that tax cuts actually produce an overall increase of reveune to the government. The editorial quotes Giuliani as saying, “I KNOW THAT reducing taxes produces more revenues. Democrats don’t know that. They don’t believe it.”

The editorial says flatly, “There’s a good reason for (not believing) that. It’s not true. And, no matter how many times Republican politicians caught up in the thrill of supply-side thinking pronounce that tax cuts pay for themselves, they cannot will it to be correct.”

Excerpts from the article:

• You don’t have to turn to Democrats to refute this point; just read the studies and comments by Republican economists, including many from the Bush administration. President Bush’s Treasury Department, analyzing the “dynamic” effects of making the Bush tax cuts permanent, found that even under favorable assumptions, the positive economic impact would make up for no more than 10 percent of the tax cuts’ cost.
• “I certainly would not claim that tax cuts pay for themselves,” Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, testified last year.
• N. Gregory Mankiw, another former Council of Economic Advisers head in the Bush White House, concluded in 2005 that cuts on capital gains taxes could generate enough extra growth to recoup half the lost revenue in the long run; cutting taxes on wages could recover just 17 percent of the costs.
• An analysis conducted by the Congressional Budget Office under the direction of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who had been an economic adviser in the Bush White House, found that, under the rosiest of scenarios, a 10 percent reduction in the personal income tax rate would generate enough economic growth to replace 22 percent of lost revenue in the first five years and 32 percent in the second five.
• Mr. Giuliani isn’t the only believer in the tax fairy; numerous Republicans, including the president, have made similarly fanciful claims. But if he were to find himself in the White House and hoping to find that extra revenue he is convinced tax cuts produce, Mr. Giuliani would discover only disappointment under the presidential pillow.

From The Washington Post, December 1, 2007

Interesting article in the Washington Post says that more blogs are written Japanese than are written in English. The article says, “The Japanese have gone blog wild.”

Excerpts from the article:

• In the past three years, Japanese has been running ahead of or about even with English as the dominant language of blogging. Of all recorded blog postings in the fourth quarter of last year, 37 percent were written in Japanese, 36 percent in English and 8 percent in Chinese.About 130 million people understand Japanese, while about 1.1 billion understand English.
• By some estimates, as much as 40 percent of Japanese blogging is done on mobile phones, often by commuters staring cross-eyed at tiny screens for hours as they ride the world’s most extensive network of subways and commuter trains.
• Japan’s conformist culture has embraced a technology that Americans often use for abrasive self-promotion and refashioned it as a soothingly nonconfrontational medium for getting along.
• Bloggers here shy away from politics and barbed language. They rarely trumpet their expertise. Compared with Americans, Japanese blog at less length, they write anonymously, and they write a whole lot more often.

This article was originally entitled “Japan’s Bloggers: Humble Giants of the Web” and was written by Blaine Harden for Washington Post Foreign Service