Hacker News Reader

So.. you’d have both higher taxes and higher interchange fees? What’s the appeal of that?

VAT is a regressive consumption tax. Raising VAT, hurting poor people the most, skimming a bit off the top and then "redistributing" it back to them would make no sense.

Do you mean a higher corporate tax paid by companies like VISA and Mastercard?

Either way, the solution is already on the horizon: Digital Euro.

Your solution sounds significantly more complicated actually.

In what way? There are many sources of inequality. Trying to play whack a mole with each one seems much more laborious than simply deciding how much inequality you want in society, and then setting it with the tax code

Inequality isn’t as simple as pulling one tax lever, and not all levers are equally effective at all points of the pull. Dead-weight loss is an important concept when designing tax policies, otherwise why not simply eliminate ALL taxes in place of an expanded VAT or income tax or corporate tax or whatever.