From the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal:

"Ask Mike Huckabee about his tax plan and he'll talk about pimps and prostitutes," the Concord (N.H.) Monitor reports. Not a bad lead. The story continues:

The Republican presidential candidate often says that one of the selling points of his plan to replace the federal income tax with a 23 percent sales tax is that it would force those who deal in cash to pay taxes.

"You end the underground economy," Huckabee said at a recent luncheon for the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce. "Illegals, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, drug dealers--everybody pays taxes."

Huh? Does Huckabee really think prostitutes are going to collect sales taxes and pass them on to the government? Apparently not:

William Ahern, spokesman for The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group in Washington, D.C., said even Huckabee's claim about pimps and prostitutes isn't true.

"Say (a drug dealer) spends $100,000 on a tricked-out Hummer," Ahern said. "Instead of just paying the local car tax or sales tax, he would be paying, according to the Fair Tax, the full 23 percent (tax).

"But he won't be collecting the Fair Tax on his sale of drugs," Ahern added. "You and me, the two secret heroin addicts who are pouring our wages into the coffers of this drug dealer instead of making mortgage payments . . . we avoid paying the Fair Tax by buying heroin instead of taxable goods."

To put it another way, under Huckabee's plan, johns and drug addicts would pay for sex and drugs with pretax income.