[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.