Mike Huckabee says the Internal Revenue Service is an "out-of-control" agency that should be abolished in favor of a consumption-based "fair tax."
"The day the IRS was created, the fundamental relationship between the American people (the boss) and the government (their servant) was turned upside down," the former Arkansas governor and two-time presidential candidate wrote Thursday on MikeHuckabee.com.
"The government has no business demanding to know your income or controlling how you spend your own money. It certainly has no right to seize your property without due process of law, or to assume you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent.
"It's time not only to stop punishing productivity, but to restore the proper relationship of government as the servant of the people, not the people as servants of the government. That can begin only when the Fair Tax replaces the income tax, and the IRS is no more."
Huckabee also criticized the size of the IRS.
"As of 2015, we already had 85,000 IRS agents," he said. "That was over twice as many IRS agents as FBI agents, and over 14 times more IRS agents than CIA agents."
The fair tax plan, first introduced in Congress in 1999, would replace all federal taxes with a single national consumption tax on retail sales.
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