IS THIS TAX FLAT UNFAIR?

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But if that's true, the flat tax would collect less money than the current system, at least in the short term. Robert Hall, a conservative Stanford University economist, who with his colleague Alvin Rabushka literally wrote the book on the subject (The Flat Tax, 1985), estimates that Forbes' scheme would widen the federal deficit by $182 billion a year--just when a majority of voters in both parties say they want a balanced budget before new tax cuts. Forbes, a believer in the quasi-theology called supply-side economics, assumes that tax cuts, even when financed by federal borrowing, will generate so much economic growth that they will quickly wipe out the deficit. He paints a vision of wealthy investors shifting their money out of T-bills and into new factories and inventions. It may not have worked that way in the 1980s, when top tax rates were slashed and the deficit soared, but that's the reason supply-siders are often described as optimists. Though he generally holds that "the deficit is not our biggest problem" and declines to specify spending he would cut, Forbes has taken to hedging his supply-side bet. He now asserts that a Republican Congress is far more likely to cut spending, especially on the military now that the cold war is over.

Still, even conservative economists and tax experts say middle-class Americans are not likely to make out as well under the Forbes plan as he promises. To raise as much revenue as the current tax system, the Hall-Rabushka plan starts at a 19% tax rate, 2 points higher than Forbes', and exempts much less income from taxation--$25,000 instead of $36,000. Hall and Rabushka estimate that under their proposal, taxpayers with incomes between $30,000 and $90,000 would pay slightly more in income taxes than they do now. That is in part because an unavoidable cost of the simplicity of a single-rate tax is lower tax collections from the wealthy, and that revenue must be recouped somewhere. In their plan, and in Forbes', the nonrich would probably lose in other ways as well. Because most businesses, shorn of special tax breaks, would face higher effective tax rates, they would probably pass along that cost as higher consumer prices. Denied a tax break for employer-provided health insurance, companies would either curtail those benefits or reduce wages. And under Forbes' plan, there would be no relief from the biggest tax burden that faces most workers: the 15.3% Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.

Forbes' rise in the polls has led to a case of me-tooism among his G.O.P. rivals, several of whom quickly announced their flat-tax plans last week even while attacking Forbes' scheme as favoring, in Pat Buchanan's barb, "the boys down at the yacht basin." Buchanan and Senator Phil Gramm offered single-rate tax plans that would retain the popular deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions and would tax investment income. A long-shot candidate, self-made tire magnate Morry Taylor, asks why Forbes would charge him nothing on the $15 million he collected last year in stock profits but charge his workers full tax on their wages. Says Taylor: "It's nuts."