Huckabee touts Fair Tax during fair appearance

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee stuck with his main campaign trail themes Thursday during his appearance at The Des Moines Register’s State Fair Soapbox.

Huckabee’s 20-minute speech garnered applause at least six times from the more than 100 people crowded around the stage. Statements about morality, abortion and eliminating the IRS got the most rousing applause.

The former Arkansas governor is one of 17 people seeking the Republican nomination for president. He was the first presidential candidate to appear at the Soapbox during the fair, which began Thursday and has been a fair event since 2003.

During his speech at the Soapbox, Huckabee re-iterated his support for ending abortion.

“I’m not sure how we fully expect to invoke God’s blessing on this country if we continue the slaughter of unborn children in their mother’s wombs, 60 million of whom have passed away since 1973,” he said. “Let’s start acting like a civilized people rather than barbarians. Let’s stop the slaughter.”

He also talked about how, if elected, he would secure the border during the first year of his presidency.

Huckabee said that if a 1,700-mile road could be built in less than a year between British Columbia and Alaska 73 years ago, a wall can be built to keep illegal immigrants from entering the U.S. along its southern border.

“Of course we can secure the border but you have to have a president that says, ‘I’ll do it and I’ll make sure it gets done’,” he said. “I will be a president that will get it done.”

Huckabee answered seven questions after talking, including one from a person who asked him how he would be improve the U.S. economy.

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He said passage of the Fair Tax by Congress would provide a boost to the economy, growing it by 6 percent. The Fair Tax, is a tax on consumption rather than income.

“Right now, we’re designing things, we’re creating things, but we’re making them in China,” he said. “And what we need to be doing is making them here but we can’t because there’s 22 percent embedded tax in everything we make here.

“The Fair Tax changes that and gives us the competitive edge so we bring those manufacturing jobs back.”

•QUOTE: “We have to make some truly major changes, like get the Fair Tax passed, and quit punishing people for their work, and once and for all, get rid of the criminal enterprise know, as the Internal Revenue Service,” Huckabee said as he talked about the economy.

•CROWD: The crowd was at least 10-deep onto the Grand Avenue Concourse.

•OTHER STOPS AT THE FAIR: Before his appearance at the Soapbox, Huckabee stopped at the Iowa Pork Tent for a pork chop. He got the first one off the grill on the first day of the 2015 fair. After the Soapbox, Huckabee walked through the Varied Industries Building, making stops at the 2016 GOP presidential Field of Dreams and Davis Hybrids booths.

•Up next: Huckabee was headed to Atlanta, Ga. Next week, he’ll be in Israel.

Incarceration in prison should not be the only option available to people convicted of non-violent crimes such as drug use or petty thefts, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said during an interview Thursday after his appearance on the Des Moines Register’s State Fair Soapbox.

“We need to lock up the people that we are afraid of rather than the ones we’re mad at,” said Huckabee, Arkansas’ former governor. “The fact is, there a lot of people in our prisons who really aren’t being served well by being there. They are drug addicts; they’re non-violent.”

Treatment and community-based corrections programs are viable alternatives, he said. Both types of programs were successfully used during Huckabee’s more than 10 years as Arkansas’ governor and cost considerably less than traditional incarceration, he said.

Huckabee said the federal prison system can develop a model program that could be duplicated at the state and local levels.

“It’s one of the most important things the next president has to do — devolve power from the federal government but share how solutions at the state level can be used in another state,” said Huckabee.

Before Huckabee appeared at the Soapbox, he stopped by the Iowa Pork Tent for a pork-chop-on-a-stick.

“It was fantastic,” he said. “It’s really worth a trip to the state fair.”

— Kathy A. Bolten