re: #255 lawhawk

This is similar to the whole claim about replacing the income tax with a national sales tax.

It would be a disaster, and extremely regressive (not that the GOP minds fucking the poor). It would be a hugely inflationary hit on all Americans, especially the poor, who’d see nearly everything they need to survive get taxed.

The tax base would need to be so broad, that it includes stuff that most people want/need to be tax free: food (other than prepared food - stuff bought in restaurants, which is usually taxed presently). It would also require services to get taxed.

There are states that don’t have income taxes, but there’s a federal income tax, so there’s a methodology for imposing that tax. There are states that don’t have an income tax, but this would require a tax collection system to be created that would affect every seller nationwide. It would mean that you’d have to have a consistent set of definitions and uniform taxability, which is a pipedream thus far, given that only about 20 of the states are members of the SSUTA.

There’s no one clamoring for a national sales tax.

Shifting everything to tariffs would immediately hike costs to everyone significantly, and all of those costs will be passed on to the end user. I think Krugman is low-balling the damage the tariff proposal would do to the economy.

Oh, and tariffs would wreck the economy globally, and cause massive disruptions to the supply chain and cause inflation the likes of which the nation has never seen.

You could not instantly implement this and just scrap income tax
It would be an unmanageable unaccountable administrative nightmare in addition to the economic
You’d have to phase it in/out over years. Many years