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One huge problem with this is for people that have already built up savings based on taxed income -- mostly those in or near retirement. If we move over to con
by loumf 16y ago
One huge problem with this is for people that have already built up savings based on taxed income -- mostly those in or near retirement. If we move over to consumption based, they are now going to live in a far worse tax environment then they planned for or that is fair (it's a kind of double-taxation to tax your income higher while earning income and then your consumption when you are mostly consuming, but not earning)
Not insurmountable, but it needs to be addressed, because it's a large voting block.
Also, we'd need a much better way to enforce it than we currently have. Taxes like these are trivial to dodge and hard to prove.
- megaman821 16y agoRetirees are the people in the worst situation but it can be helped a little by not collecting taxes on the IRAs and refunding the tax on the Roth IRAs. A sales tax my be slightly harder to collect but there will be a lot less people to collect it from. As the IRS, I'd rather deal with a few million merchants than hundreds of millions people.