[sperry]

Kevin, I'm the total opposite when it comes to taxes. I'm all for a pure sales tax. Figure 20% flat tax on all first retail sales of goods and services. Toss in an upper bound of around 10% local sales taxes, and we're looking at about 30% tax. So, if you're a lower income family, your effective tax rate will go up, but then the gov't cuts a rebate check to every citizen over say 5 or 10 years old... so if you're poor, the rebate should nearly cover 100% of your effective tax rate, and if you're rich, the rebate is just a token drop in the bucket. IMO, there's nothing more fair than that... you can even refuse to pay taxes 100% just by purchasing everything second hand.

The administration of a national sales tax gets computerized, everyone that sells more than some $ threshold of items each year will be required to pass the collected tax on to the gov't via logging in and recording sales and EFT transfers. So you can still sell stuff on eBay or private party all you want, until you're selling enough to be considered a "reseller". Securities and stocks, etc, are taxed at their purchase prices, rather than dealing with cost basis and capital gains, etc. Effectively investment bankers may even pay less tax than they do now, which is fine because really the US's only exportable commodity these days is banking. Might as well try to keep that as healthy as possible.

The only other tax besides sales tax would probably be property tax. I'm kinda fundamentally opposed to the idea of repeat taxes on something just for owning it... but real estate, just by simply existing, does cost a city money due to road and utility maintenance... so I think I could get over that. Otherwise, I love the idea that a flat sales tax means individuals have complete power over how much tax they spend based on their purchasing habits. Plus you make money off all the folks that make their money illegally, not to mention the huge income from taxing sales on the internet.