This is also easily accomplished now that almost all payments are happening digitally, assigned to a taxpayer ID#. We can easily replace a W-2 or 1099 with total spending instead of taxing working.
Of course, this should also be paired with similarly designed land value and estate taxes to disincentivize hoarding.
Maybe my household LLC should buy all my groceries while I work for the LLC which employs me as the sole contractor and live in the house that I rent from the LLC which I am the sole owner of. For major purchases, I can hire a low-income person to do the purchase and then sell the item to me, or maybe they lease it to me.
I'm not a tax lawyer but it's pretty easy to see the many loopholes in alternative tax proposals.
Where are you getting this from? Sales tax has nothing to do with one's assets. Also, land value taxes make hiding assets moot, since all real assets have to be stored on land. Of course, copyright protections would need to be reformed to be for far shorter durations of time.
>Maybe my household LLC should buy all my groceries while I work for the LLC which employs me as the sole contractor and live in the house that I rent from the LLC which I am the sole owner of.
Why should LLC's be exempt from the tax?
>For major purchases, I can hire a low-income person to do the purchase and then sell the item to me,
How does this help? You are still purchasing the item. If you are referring to purchasing it with cash and committing tax evasion, the same is possible with income tax today.
>or maybe they lease it to me.
Renting something is still considered a sale. You get charged sales tax at hotels. Renting apartments is not usually subject to sales tax, but that is a policy choice.
Earlier you said
> And poorer people are automatically exempted from tax since the power law formula parameters be set to slowly ramp up
I too am very confused on how you envision this sales tax working where it's variable in some way that poor people don't get the tax but rich people do so I understand why OP is asking about asset tracking. If you're talking about it as a tax that increases the more you spend you've still got problems of hiding how much I'm spending through various legal entities. It also has a macro economic problem, at least how the consumer economy is structured, that could slow down the gears of business until society realigns (if it does) because people will be incentivized to consume less. You've got alternative models where you go after specific products and tax more for conspicuous consumption like yachts but that feels like it has all the inefficiencies of central planning a market.
Because poor people can't spend money (since they don't have it), hence they pay much less (or even no tax). The curve of a power law formula can be modified to whatever is socially acceptable. Otherwise, rich people who are hoarding assets will get taxed via land value taxes utilizing the same framework.
>you've still got problems of hiding how much I'm spending through various legal entities.
Same with income tax. Completely stamping out tax evasion is not a realistic goal with any system. Also, various legal entities are all tied to beneficial owners with taxpayer ID numbers. Databases would make quick work of sorting this kind of stuff out.
>It also has a macro economic problem, at least how the consumer economy is structured, that could slow down the gears of business until society realigns (if it does) because people will be incentivized to consume less.
Yes, that is why it is a pipe dream. But it would actually accomplish environmental goals as opposed to just pay lip service and pretend.
>You've got alternative models where you go after specific products and tax more for conspicuous consumption like yachts but that feels like it has all the inefficiencies of central planning a market.
Completely unnecessary to complicate things which also opens up avenues for corruption. A yacht is super expensive, it's obviously going to be hit with a ton of tax. Just come up with a tax curve (like we already do with the various income tax deductions/brackets) that provides the tax revenue and still allows people to spend enough money to provide for their basic needs.
I'd go with same tax rates for everybody, but tax credits for useful activities. Since being a poor consumer is useful activity because those pay most attention to what they buy I'd be just giving people tax credit for existing and possibly for working if I wanted to incentivise that. Since purchase tax for individual consumers should be collected and paid by the sellers to save the individuals the burden of it and to ensure compliance then the best form of tax credit for consumers is just cashed given them directly from the government. Some for existing some possibly to supplement their salaries if they work. There's some risk that they won't spend it all to pay for their purchase tax but this can be forgiven as it'll mostly happen for the very poorest.
You can of course "own" things informally but then you don't get any support from courts when the paper owner decides you really own nothing.
I came up with the idea of puchase tax and progressive real estate tax myself, but I'm sure other people had same ideas before me.
