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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

How about removing income tax (hard to measure, easy to avoid by rich) and increasing vat by the same amount. Vat could be even added to stocks (buying $5000 of Tesla stocks? Pay 20% vat. This could probably end all short term speculations as well). Definitely to yacht and houses, vacations, butlers and gardeners, gold doorknobs, Ferraris, swimming pools, 200" LCDs, hotel stays, massages, anything that is consumption really)

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Because this would absolutely shaft everyone other than the well off?

Because there would be no way at all of scaling the tax based on income / wealth? So someone earning almost nothing with no wealth would be expected to pay the same tax as a billionaire?

See the Fair Tax proposal for one way to address this problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax

A large UBI would address this OK, but FairTax seems to really work to keep the tax as regressive as possible without being quite so bad as a flat VAT. A "welfare payment" for "low-income earners" means you have to be in the system ("earner"), that income still has to be calculated, and that the payment is stigmatized ("welfare") instead of presented as an entitlement.

This also seems bad: "The proposed Fair Tax Act would apply a tax, once, at the point of purchase on all new goods and services for personal consumption" - "personal consumption" is arbitrary. A VAT tax applied everywhere for all goods would be fair and harder to avoid. Though even that seems like it would encourage financialization to hide material production.

Yes thanks. That thing sounds like a Trojan horse; VAT and UBI is much better.

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