[quantadev]

The only way to force everyone to pay is with a consumption tax. We'd tax based on consumption so those yachts, Rolexes, and home construction, etc. that the rich spend crazy amounts on gets taxed.

Of course since a consumption tax hurts the poor disproportionately, the gov't would send a refund check to them, in large enough amounts to make up for it, where the poor are basically paying zero tax.

It also fairly discourages illegal immigration because illegals wouldn't get that kickback check from the Gov't, since they're 'visitors' not 'citizens'.

[reacharavindh]

As complicated as this would be to implement, it is only solution I think sounds like a fair policy to discourage getting filthy rich while lifting the poor to a better economic balance. Although, I have a feeling the filthy rich would simply choose to spend elsewhere where the consumption taxes don’t exist or are lower…

[quantadev]

It's easy to implement, because sales tax already exists in every state but 5 right? So it's already all built-in to the Point-of-Sales software, banking, finance, etc.

Insofar as simply "choosing to spend elsewhere (outside USA)", somehow sales-tax is something people find difficult to avoid already right? We're just talking about increasing existing sales tax amount, and then eliminating all Federal tax.

[ericd]

Revenue neutral carbon taxes with all income dividended back out per capita are really the move here. It’s also one of the few really promising ways to tackle climate change effectively.

[quantadev]

Seems to me like that's a similar approach but a consumption tax is easier for everyone to understand and would be therefore more palatable to the public. Also the consumption tax would have a similar affect of taxing people proportional to the amount of damage they're doing to the environment. For example, we want a big tax on Rolexes but making a watch doesn't really do that much carbon consumption.

[dragonwriter]

> Seems to me like that's a similar approach but a consumption tax is easier for everyone to understand and would be therefore more palatable to the public.

There is a false assumption here, that easy to understand makes it more palatable. A flat capitation would be even easier to understand, and even less palatable, because the ease of understanding is directly connected, in its case, to the ease of opponents organizing against it. A flat consumption tax faces a similar problem, which is why the efforts to push one to replace the income and payroll taxes for decades now under the label "Fair Tax" have been unsuccessful -- easy to understand isn't a political benefit when people who understand it often don't like what they understand.

[quantadev]

The current insanely complicated tax code (with trillion upon trillions of rules and special cases) is something that even professional Tax Accountants admit no human can possibly understand.

But we know one thing as a fact: MOST OF IT was WRITTEN by Washington DC lobbyists specifically to embed in it all the loopholes that make it so that the elite in this country will pay hardly any taxes at all. Basically the fox guarding the hen house.

The obvious solution is to throw it ALL out and go with something simple that everyone understands. The reason this doesn't ever happen is because those same K-Street lobbyists make very large financial "contributions" to the same politicians in DC whose votes are required for a change.