Blasphemy: a National Sales Tax would be MUCH better than our present or any Income Tax system

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10. entirely the wrong solution to the stated problems.

the problems you list have to do with insufficient enforcement and corruption of the idea and goals of a progressive income tax to the benefit of the rich. rich people and their lobbyists and republican politicians have flattened the progressivity of the rates, figured out ways to have rich people income (like income from capital) be taxed at lower rates than ordinary people income (income from labor) and even let rich people disguise income from labor as income from capital (incentive stock options, e.g.) to get away with contributing even less.

the solution to that is not to ignore the corrupting actions of the rich and greedy and replace the structure of the tax system with something that on its face further benefits the rich at the expense of the poor and then to try to convince people that it will work because it somehow magically won't then be corrupted by the same forces you're conceding to now.


if the rich can corrupt the income tax system to favor them at the expense of the poor, they'll even more readily corrupt a sales tax system to benefit themselves at the expense of the poor.

so give me a break, i'm not buying for one minute that a sales tax would be a boon for the poor. as soon as or prior to a national sales tax is passed, the rich will get to work and eventually the things rich people buy will face a lower or zero sales tax (after all, executives need personal helicopters to create jobs) and poor people will have to pay taxes on more and more (food is exempt? oh, but that food has a tiny amount of sugar in it or was imported or whatever so it's not exempt).


income tax is not inherently problematic in terms of enforcement. the problem is we've let it evolve into a system where people can disguise or evade it more and more, at least if you're rich or a business. the solution to that is not to change what you tax, the solution is more and better enforcement and to change the rules so that it's harder to evade.

start by taxing all income the same whether it's from labor or capital. restore progressivity to the rates. hire many more irs auditors. require deductions to have much better documentation, e.g., it's not an expense unless it appears as income on someone else's taxes. that would make it much more enforceable, kinda like a value added tax except for income.