A National Sales Tax, which I think you are purposing, would still require auditing.
Sure, but only a fraction of the amount. Don't forget, Walmart is 40% of all retail sales in the United States. You throw in Target, Costco, KMart, Sears, Amazon and Ebay and all of the gasoline and nat gas distributors, and you're probably over 95% of all retail in the country. There will be zero cheating from those vested interests, so you're really talking about a very small portion left to worry over, and most of it would be small shops whose owners would be very afraid of 10 year minimum sentences for black market sales.
Going to a pure sales tax system would be just as prone to cheating as the current system, if not more so.
Disagree completely. As I noted above, most retail shops are already collecting tax. It would be trivial to have them collect 40% tax rather than 6%, and they'd have no incentive to cheat.
, and is potentially disproportionately burdensome on the poor, unless you modify your "all goods sold" position.
This gets down to fundamental tax theory.
Fundamentally, the fairest system is that everybody pays the same share, as we are all citizens with equal rights. 10 of us go on a camping trip, we all throw in 20 bucks for canoe. We don't charge Chuck more because he's the richest.
But if you want a system where "fair" means that people who have more pay more, then this system is perfect. People who make 20k a year only spend about 5-10 a year on retail. People making 100k a year spend a lot more. The 20k guy eats at McDonalds and pays X% of a 6 dollar meal. The 100k guy eats at SnobbyJoe's Grill and pays X% of a 30 dollar meal. If that's still not enough socialism for you, reduce or eliminate the tax on fundamentals - Milk, basic foods, basic cloth - and increase it on the more expensive items. 1$-100$ it's X%, 100 to 1000 it's 1.3X%, 1000 to 5000 it's 1.5X%, and so on. That's the beauty of it - very simple to target whatever you want using a single collection system.
Eliminating property tax, which is inherently regressive, sounds good until you realize that it is the funds for home rule and local government.
No problem here. Home rule and local governments get their checks the same as the Feds.
A big centralized government making all the decisions isn't likely to be received well in this country.
Not sure what this means. The system I proposed eliminates a tremendous amount of Federal largess and involvement in our lives. No longer would the Feds be able to give tax breaks to special interests and the like. This is the main reason that this sort of thing would never get through - the fed govt. has gotten bigger every year for 230 years - there is no way they'd agree to shrink.
Keep in mind as well that eliminating deductions, at least without a very gradual phase, in would be enormously destabilizing to things like property values, charities and R and D expenditures.
Time to get rid of artificial govt incentives that are scattered throughout the tax code. If the country felt that it simply could not get by without having the govt meddling in mortgage loan interest, than the govt could simply give out grants, outside of the tax code.
BTW - this is nothing like a VAT tax, which tacks a tax on services and goods at virtually every stage of production and distribution. This is simply a retail sales tax. That's it. Of course, it goes without saying, that the attitude of anybody supporting this would have to be that the point is to eliminate the 100 different tax systems and sources that exist. If a retail sales tax were implemented, it would be only if no other tax existed - otherwise it's just one more silly way to squeeze the same money out of people.
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