No, the point about the economic efficiency of consumption taxes is the main point. Making them progressive is just a way to address the perceived downside of b

No, the point about the economic efficiency of consumption taxes is the main point. Making them progressive is just a way to address the perceived downside of being regressive. The fact that consumption taxes are better than investment taxes remains whether or not you do that. (Trump has floated the idea of rebates to address this.) There’s a ton of literature on this, and it led to european countries widely adopting VAT in the 20th century. That’s also why the European countries like France have much higher consumption taxes than the U.S., while having similar corporate taxes. They want to discourage consumption.