[tthomas48]

Sure, I was trying to create a simplistic system here though. Clearly if we spent years we might come up with something sort of elegant and sort of fair, just like our tax code.

The point is it's easier to figure out what you're contributing to the economy via sales tax than it is via investment. It's difficult to tell the difference between the guy who has invested $2 billion in 10,000 different startups, and the guy who is generating no revenue sitting on $2 billion in non-productive land in the middle of nowhere. Clearly we don't want to tax investment in startups just so we can see who's investing.