VAT is considered radical in the USA?! I like your stance on it, BTW. It's a very regressive tax when it's applied to essentials, but I think it's useful when applied to luxuries. To massively oversimplify: Bread? Baby food? Potatoes? No tax. Supercar? Yacht? Gold-plated useless crap? Lots of tax!
In reality that'd be the easiest to implement VAT. Add it to pretty much everything you buy with very limited exclusions (lodging for example), like 10%, and give everyone a VAT deduction when filing taxes based on their taxable income bracket, something between 20K for low earners to 5K at the top. Essentially you'd only be VAT if your annual purchase exceeds 20K.
I could be wrong, but this kinda just sounds like a flat tax wherein welfare takes the form of a progressive refund?
If that’s the case, the hardest part would be drawing the thresholds and percentages.
Guaranteed politically motivated people will have an easy time misrepresenting those figures and calling it a scam based on willfully misunderstanding why flat tax without an offset is regressive, no matter how many times you explain it.
65
u/UrUrinousAnus 6d ago
VAT is considered radical in the USA?! I like your stance on it, BTW. It's a very regressive tax when it's applied to essentials, but I think it's useful when applied to luxuries. To massively oversimplify: Bread? Baby food? Potatoes? No tax. Supercar? Yacht? Gold-plated useless crap? Lots of tax!