Why a Fair Tax doesn’t work
There is a thread on the fool.com boards discussing a fair tax, ie a simple sales tax on everything, and income tax would then be abolished. People much smarter than I am are talking about why it wouldn’t work:
TMF: Re: fair tax / Atheist Fools
Wealthier people certainly use the roads to get goods delivered to them, don’t they? That big house, with the marble from Vermont and the lumber from Oregon? Didn’t that come in via roads? Those 5 big screen TV’s, didn’t those come on a truck? In this society, if you spend more, you are surely using the roads to procure those goods, aren’t you? Speaking of “wealthy”, it’s clear that most of the corporations in America are owned by the wealthy, or at least “not the poor”. Both private and public corporations, I would guess, since “the poor” don’t tend to own much of anything, stocks included. Wouldn’t you say that corporations make pretty good use of the roads? From General Motors to Amazon.com, without those “good roads” their business would be very different, wouldn’t it?