[shagie]

Yep - we're on the same page now.

Also consider things like Nevada which has no income tax and one of the higher combined sales tax because they are able to extract money from out of state people as tourists there.

California also shows up in the "rather high combined sales tax" in part because local governments arne't able to reliably use property tax (yes, its another regressive tax - and California is a special case there) to raise local funds. ( https://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/sales-tax/unders... ).

There are some progressiveish aspects to sales tax as it selects which items are taxable. In Minnesota (for example), clothing is not taxed. On the other hand, from Wisconsin, its sometimes cheaper to shop online and have Ikea delivered rather than go to Chicago and pay local taxes there ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/State_Sa... )

In many cases, sales taxes try to tax the more "luxury" items though it gets complicated (food eaten in the place of purchase gets taxed while food that is not hot and to be consumed elsewhere is not taxed).

This comes from experience working in the tax part of point of sales software a few years ago. The "it gets complicated" gets really complicated... and even worse when you then start looking at it from the fiscal policy side for local governments.