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Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

Sales Taxes are the worst ones. Burden on seller, burden on buyer, regressive. Income is more fair but easy to mask-out for the wealthy. Property is meh, Wealth tax is the best one. Assuming all were well designed.

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Sales tax and the gasoline tax are use taxes. They are about as fair (democratic) as you’re gonna get because it’s based upon use most the other taxes whether they’re high or low, you can’t escape from particularly if you are the average person in the middle, and once again, if you benefit from capital gains, that is a huge life-changing benefit, which most working people don’t have. Vote yes. on proposition 40 if you are in California the less than .001 and even the 1% will easily survive.

Property is literally a wealth tax on an asset that can’t move away

why is it a burden when they are already collecting sales tax? They just change one number but nothing else changes.

Some items taxable, some are not. Keep track. Some have different rates depending on who's buying, keep track. Buyers in different locations pay different rates, keep track. The rules change frequently, keep track. Collect money for the govt, keep track. Remit quarterly or face penalty.

There complexity and overhead on sales taxes; more than on an income, retained earnings or wealth taxes.

Also, sales taxes take more percent of wealth away from the lower wealth bracket than from the upper wealth bracket.

If you kill demand, you kill economy.

And I’m very surprised nobody mentioned cooperative tax in this post. Taxing cooperative profits is the simplest and fairest solution.

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