🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2vljjc$j5q@gap.cco.caltech.edu>,
Tyler R. Holcomb <tylerh@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:
>1.  Sales Taxes are *very* regressive.  This fact is so well established that
>I won't bore you with a blizzard of references.  If you're so dense you can't
>figure this out for yourself, e-mail me.  (that rant wasn't for Mr. Linley).

Sales taxes can be made less regressive by excluding the items the poor
spend most of their money on, such as groceries, car repairs, apartment
rent, etc.

But the real problem with sales taxes is that they're too easy a target
for a hungry government.  We need to put government on a starvation diet
to try to make it lose weight, or at least to not gain weight so fast.
Allowing them to collect sales tax, and to increase the sales tax rates
in an "emergency", is like keeping ice cream around just in case your
hungry dieter ever gets hungry.

Just think, sales tax rates are presently below 10%, and there's no limit
to how much they can be increased to feed the growing government's growing
hunger for more and more revenue.  If you think 100% sales taxes are some
kind of an absolute physical limit, think again.

The best solution would be to get rid of both sales taxes and income taxes.
Better sources of revenue would be road tolls, etc., and reducing the cost
and power of government to the point where it would not need as much income.
If we insist on having big government, we could use real estate tax as its
primary source of income.  That would work very well because the people who
own real estate tend to vote more and therefore would tend to vote down any
increases in the size of government or in tax rates.