(no subject)

[gfish]

Huh. It strikes me that, with modern technology, one could have a progressive sales tax.

Comments

[craigp.livejournal.com]

i must be missing something; are you implying modern technology is required in order to have a progressive sales tax?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Not absolutely, but it doesn't strike me as particularly practical otherwise. I'm mostly just interested in the theoretical breakage of the standard 'sales tax regressive, income tax progressive' rule.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

The basic idea is that a sales tax tends to be a flat percentage, and that it therefore affects those with less money, who tend to buy more stuff that they need, than those with a lot, who tend to buy a lot of stuff that they just want. Thus, someone who earns little money every year winds up paying a larger chunk of it to the government than someone who earns a lot.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Right, so with a fancy system to apply a varying sales tax based on the buyers income, you could make it progessive.

Not saying this is a wonderful idea, I just find the theoretical possibility interesting.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

OK, in theory, sure. In practice, if you come into my comic book store and buy a $75 Absolute edition of Watchmen, do you really want to reveal your financial status to me so that I, as collector of the sales tax, can charge you the correct amount? Setting aside the hassle for me, having to calculate a different point of sale price dependent not upon me or upon the product, but upon the personal information of a customer who is otherwise a total stranger? It might be possible to do, but I don't think it would be better than extant practices.

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

And poor people could make money buying groceries for rich people.

[noumignon.livejournal.com]

You are clever. That's the difference between this and the progressive user-fees they have in Denmark, where a traffic ticket costs you a percentage of your income instead of a flat fee. You can't have someone else speed for you.

[dianthus.livejournal.com]

Because I want everyone I buy from to know my income!

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

I'm now thinking of all the other things we could have with modern technology. Biometrically-secured telephones. Borda-count voting for school superintendents. "Smart" roads that change colour when you speed. Shaving razors that tell you stock prices.

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking yesterday that we should have store doors that automagically charge you for things, no check-out required. As you walk through the door, it scans everything you're carrying or in your cart. You'd have to carry some sort of charge card that the door could recognize. It would log everything that's already been bought so if you walked in and out again you wouldn't get charged twice. Maybe the doors would have to be double (like an airlock) to protect against tailgating.

[sar-anon.livejournal.com]

They are actually working on full cart scanners. It's still something that you would have to wait in line a little for and then input payment, but it should be a lot faster.
It works on a tiny chip about the size of a grain of rice, much like what they implant into animals for indentification, that can be read from each item as you pass through the check out stand.
There are still QA issues and other logistical issues to work on, but it's probably something that you will see in the next 5 years or so.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

It's unlikely — while you could certainly provide an income pro-rating for sales tax which would be a good step towards abolishing it, you can't deal with the discretionary vs. mandatory spending gap across economic classes, and you don't deal with savings in any way.  There's also the huge social economic information disclosure problem, although with sufficient technology, you could avoid that, too. (Sales tax would be paid as part of a seperate and opaque transaction, basically, which means that cash economies won't won't work, and life generally sucks)  Overall, better to not bother and just tax the fuck out of the rich on direct and indirect income, along with some nicely punitative inheritance taxes.

[xmurf.livejournal.com]

It seems like it would be better¹ to simply issue weekly refund checks of overcollected sales tax to people who qualify. Then the merchants have to track ID² but they don't need to know your income or deal with a separate tax transaction.

¹ For values of 'better' equal to 'if this horrible idea were considered desirable at all'.
² But only on the transactions they want considered for the refund, perhaps. Or alternately, you could simply have the tax bureau accept authenticated receipts and issue refunds on that basis.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Another option, less overhead-intensive, would be to exempt the poorest from all sales tax, and have a card you show the register to establish examption. A food-stamp card you're paying with would automatically qualify. Of course, groceries are already exempt from sales tax in any halfway sane jurisdiction, so never mine.

[xmurf.livejournal.com]

Actually, everything is already exempt from sales tax in any halfway sane jurisdiction (there are just very few halfway sane jurisdictions). It seems to work fine for Oregon, so let's just eliminate it instead of trying to patch it. :)

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

I heartily agree. Unfortunately, I live in Washington, which has sales tax and no income tax, and this is not likely to change anytime soon.

Pardon my typo in the previous comment; I'd fix it if I could.

Add that to the list.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

With modern technology, we could have preference voting. Thomas Edison learned a relevant lesson trying to pitch an electronic vote counting system to the U.S. Congress. It was 100 years later that such a system was finally installed.

With modern technology, we could eliminate all advertising. People wouldn't find out that a good or service existed, without having a need for that specific good or service. And the process would all be initated by the buyer, not the seller.

With modern technology, we could eliminate pollution. What's waste output for one industrial process, is an input for another process.

With modern technology, we could eliminate war. War results when there is a disagreement between factions as to their reletive strengths. With modern communication infrastructure, there could be all kinds of methods to mediate these disagreements, and ways of finding out reletive strength without bloodshed. (I am not claiming that we could or would want to eliminate conflict, just that conflict would no longer merit the label 'war'.)

With modern technology, we might not be able to eliminate diease, but we could reduce its global impact on people's lives dramatically. If you look at the numbers of people who suffer from problems that are easily fixed, the room for improvement boggles the mind.

With modern technology, we could drastically mitigate poverty. That by itself is a pie-in-the-sky statement, but Buckminster Fuller fleshed out the argument to several deciaml places, using language that not everyone is comfortable with. I don't think we could (or would want to) eliminate disagreements about human wealth.

---

A lot of people ask me about why don't seem to act on my big ideas, and the answer I give them is related to the problems with these ideas. It's not the technology that's lacking. It's design skill. Humanity has got lots of people who know how to take a plan as written, and run with it. We've got a dire shortage of people trained to ask critical questions about why these plans might not be such a good idea. And even fewer people equipped to propose reasonable alternatives.

Don't get me wrong, I think a progressive sales tax is a pretty cool idea. But the reason such a tax is not going to happen any time soon, is related to the question of why we can't trust our election system to deliver accurate reports on the domocratic process.

If you look at the reasons why any of these above listed ideas aren't going to happen any time soon, a pattern emerges. If anyone can find a way to articulate this pattern and combat it, without being killed, driven insane, or forced into irrelevancy, they could write their own ticket.

Come to think of it...

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

Setting aside my pissiness for a moment, I can think of all kinds of things you simply would not want to tax at all. And I can think of some things you'd want to tax in some very specific ways.

This is a cool idea. It offers up an entirly new method for a socialist society to sculpt itself. (Just not this one.)

[lonelyache.livejournal.com]

Is this so different from giving poor people a tax credit for sales tax? It is coarser, perhaps.