I strongly suspect that part of the reason sales taxes are easy to pass is because it's really hard to convert that into a dollar amount that you'll end up payi

I strongly suspect that part of the reason sales taxes are easy to pass is because it's really hard to convert that into a dollar amount that you'll end up paying. For income tax, you can ballpark it by just multiplying your income by the percentage increase. If you want a better answer, you need to see how much of your income falls into the affected brackets, but you can still get an answer in 15 minutes or so. It's really hard to figure out how many more dollars I'm going to pay in taxes if the sales tax goes up 1%. I have to figure out how much money I spend on goods that have sales tax. Okay, so I put $X in my savings account which isn't taxed, and I pay $Y in rent, which means I'm spending $Z on other stuff. Oh right, but not all of that has sales tax, so I have to take that stuff out. It gets complicated, fast, and the best you're going to get is an estimate. If any of those numbers change, my sales tax burden changes. Plus sales tax is deferred until you spend the money, so there's no immediate obvious impact. It's not like you have less money than you did last year, although your spending power does go down every so slightly. Income taxes are unpopular to adjust because it's easy to see how much you're losing, and it directly impacts your paychecks, which people don't like.