[scotty79]

Personally I wouldn't do the spending tracking for individuals to decide tax rates just because it's complex and perhaps to intrusive.

I'd go with same tax rates for everybody, but tax credits for useful activities. Since being a poor consumer is useful activity because those pay most attention to what they buy I'd be just giving people tax credit for existing and possibly for working if I wanted to incentivise that. Since purchase tax for individual consumers should be collected and paid by the sellers to save the individuals the burden of it and to ensure compliance then the best form of tax credit for consumers is just cashed given them directly from the government. Some for existing some possibly to supplement their salaries if they work. There's some risk that they won't spend it all to pay for their purchase tax but this can be forgiven as it'll mostly happen for the very poorest.

[lotsofpulp]

How is it complex or intrusive? We’re almost already completely there via various electronic payment methods linked to each individuals’ tax ID#.

You would no longer have to give out your tax ID# to employers or customers. The electronic payment company (which should be a government utility, but that’s a different conversation) simply reports your purchases, just like we do with various 1099/W-2 forms right now.

[scotty79]

> How is it complex or intrusive?

You'd have to have huge database of what every individual bought ever. How many beers, how many condoms per month they purchase. Or at least how many times they were making purchases in sex shop, liquor store, marihuana dispensary.

Currently your payments as a customer aren't bound to your TAX is if you don't specifically opt into it and you have no reason to do that if you don't have a company.

That's increase in a intrusiveness many would strongly oppose.

You can of course compromise and base your tax progression only on the sum of large purchases that are being registered already like houses and cars and investments.

But there's still issue of charging the correct tax if you don't connect consumer with their tax id on every purchase.

I think that companies that sell directly to consumers should collect purchase tax of consumer and pay it. And the rate should be the same for all consumers. To award consumers tax credits government just could give them cash directly that will come back to the government in the form of purchase tax that consumers pay (to sellers or through payment processors that transfer it to the government).

You can still punish the rich by reducing their tax credits progressively with how much assets such as cars, real estate and investments they own.