(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?

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

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

[dianthus.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

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.