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Generally that's considered regressive (so we all have to eat and eat about the same amount of food each day.) For jeff bezos the Tesco Extra Special range is
by lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Generally that's considered regressive (so we all have to eat and eat about the same amount of food each day.) For jeff bezos the Tesco Extra Special range is a rounding error whereas for the bottom 10% it's a large fraction of daily income. taxing that basically taxes a large fraction of their daily income.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoTax consumption progressively.
- Thorrez 6y agoHow would you implement that? Isn't consumption tax generally a sales tax? At the time of a specific sale it would be hard to find out the right tax rate.
- dahfizz 6y agoYou could have a large personal deduction. You could tax everything at the lowest rate at the point of sale but make people do the accounting and pay their real rate if they are in a higher rate. The "tax" at the point of sale would act like income withholdings do now. You could categorize good so that yatchs have a much higher rate than groceries. You could also come up with an average price for good so that really expensive e.g. clothes and cars are taxed at a higher rate than they are for "normal" goods. All it takes is some creativity.
- Thorrez 6y agoIt requires people to save receipts on everything they buy. People (in states that charge sales tax) already sort of are required to do this for goods they buy online that don't charge tax. The vast vast vast majority of people (every single person I've asked) evade this tax. I try to pay the tax myself (I'm the only person I know who does this) by going through online receipts, putting them in a spreadsheet and calculating the tax. I know I'm missing some though, I buy too much stuff. There are even people I know who don't just evade the tax out of laziness, but evade it intentionally to save money, intentionally buying stuff online because it doesn't charge tax. My point is that this will be a very large amount of effort for people, and there will be a large amount of tax evasion due to both laziness and greed.
- 082349872349872 6y agoThat's more or less what an income tax is. To first order, one only needs to realise income sufficient to support consumption.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoNot hard to eliminate the regressive parts of this, just give a tax credit for the first $X dollars of consumption. It took me a while to understand consumption taxes, but now I'm fully in favor of them. The level of your standard of living is solely determined by what you spend money on, not your total wealth. Plus taxing consumption would be much easier and harder to skirt than a wealth tax.
- coldtea 6y ago>Plus taxing consumption would be much easier and harder to skirt than a wealth tax. It's actually just as easy, if not more. E.g. you don't "buy" a car, your trust/company buys it, and you just happen to use it for "business purposes". Same for all your other needs. And good luck trying to tax spending abroad...
- dredmorbius 6y agoNow you can no longer simply tax transactions --- business points of sale are fewer in number than individual budgets, and are better instrumented for bookkeeping, auditing, and taxation --- and need somehow to track all 0ersonal consumption expenditures individually.