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A properly designed tax system can strike a balance between helping the poor and, at the same time, giving people the incentive to work.

If we were starting from scratch, there's no question a simple retail consumption tax with protections for those with lower incomes would drive the economy the best and be the simplest to administer.

If I could wave a magic wand, we would eliminate income tax; we would eliminate corporate tax. We would abolish the IRS, and we could replace all of it with one federal consumption tax.

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.

When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.

The basic idea that if you increase government spending or you cut people's taxes that stimulates the economy and lowers the unemployment rate, is a very widely accepted idea. It's in every economics textbook, that's what we teach our undergraduates, and I certainly try to teach them the truth.

So we want to change the tax system. We want it to be fair, and we want to see some tax relief because people do three things when they get a little extra money in their pocket: They save it or they spend it or they invest it.

A consumption tax, a national sales tax makes some sense. But I think that if we move towards a Fair Tax, if we move towards a national sales tax, we have to make sure that we do away with the income tax.

The nation should have a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose.