Being paid in stock does not eliminate your income tax; you still owe income tax on the fair market value of the stock. In practice, consumption taxes are extr

Being paid in stock does not eliminate your income tax; you still owe income tax on the fair market value of the stock. In practice, consumption taxes are extremely regressive. Firstly, because people who earn less necessarily have to spend a much higher proportion of their income to stay afloat. Secondly, because higher earners tend to spend their money on categories that are typically exempted (like healthcare, education, investments, political activism, real estate) -- and things that are out of the easy reach of taxation, like international travel. Consumption tax is also logistically quite expensive, because it requires every business to continually and constantly maintain records on all sales and returns; the recording for payslips is comparatively trivial. Three compliance burden is magnified by incredibly complex rules which often require teams of experts to evaluate, exactly because of the kinds of "luxury" carve outs you're already identifying seem warranted. Income tax reporting does not need to be hard for most people. The top 1% of earners cover almost 40% of revenue; the bottom 50% cover only 3%. We don't need to make everyone file and pay income taxes each year; we could do just fine with only 1/10th of Americans filling. The pain of income tax is just a contrivance in the name of "fairness" to make regular people hate the tax process and support policies that would significantly alleviate the well-offs tax burden. Policies like exchanging income tax for sales tax.