Sales taxes are well known for avoiding the bit rich people do - not spending. Aka saving. And naturally they are regressive so you have to adjust them. I beli

Sales taxes are well known for avoiding the bit rich people do - not spending. Aka saving. And naturally they are regressive so you have to adjust them. I believe there is a better simpler way. An operational tax system is one where whoever is paying you your money pays tax on that value transfer. This is what a payroll tax should be - largely a tax on employers for using your services. The employee should always get the full wage and be completely ignorant of the tax paid. That allows taxes to be put up a little easier because corporations don't vote. Since the sole functional purpose of taxes is to release resources for the public use, and the requirement tends to be for manpower, increasing the cost of jobs so there are fewer private jobs is exactly what is required. Then government can hire the people released. In fact government must hire all that are released since it is taxation that is stopping them getting a job in the first place. If too many people are released then the tax is too high. Lower it. If corporations moan that they "can't get the staff", politicians have to justify why they need the manpower for the public use instead. Also the tax has to be progressive, since government tends to want higher skilled people to work for it and they have higher salaries. Therefore there is no point taxing lower earning workers the same as the higher earning workers the government needs. After all there's already plenty of lower skilled people available - we call them 'unemployed'. No income tax, no sales tax, no corporation tax. Just a highly salient tax on any value transferred to individuals from other persons - whether businesses, organisations or pension trusts - notionally charged on the individual, but calculated and paid by the third party. That ensures collection rates are high (the UK PAYE system has a collection loss of 1% vs 7% for VAT - the sales tax for example). You'll note the operational tax taxes costs, not profits. Costs are a matter of fact, profits a matter of opinion. The tax is also on a cash basis, not accruals. If you use manpower today, you pay tax on it - again because government wants to use manpower today. It has to be on a resource and uses basis so everything balances functionally. On top of the operational tax, you then require political taxes. In the UK we have different names for these - levies, duties, excise. So as the operational tax chugs away 'Releasing the Resources' required for government, the Cigarette Duty addresses the 'sin' of smoking and the 'Wealth Levy' targets inequality - or not as your politics dictates. Since the purpose of political taxes are to change behaviour and eliminate themselves they don't offer a rational basis for funding the nation. Not because they don't raise the money, but because they don't release the resources government wants to use to achieve the public purpose. People aren't that fungible. Jeff Bezos doesn't have a secret stash of doctors and nurses in Amazon warehouses he can release when you tax him. This is taxation on a functional engineered basis designed from the ground up by considering "why tax at all?", and it works whatever your political stripe. Therefore it has no chance of ever happening.