13 States added to Mandatory Ebay Sales Tax on July 1st

I disagree wholeheartedly. You're focused on the government's financials, I'm focused on how individual people experience taxation and government. Taking 50% of a poor person's income while only taking 5% of a rich person's is monstrously unjust, even if the latter is a higher raw dollar amount and thus more useful to the government. I also do not think it is difficult at all to tax the wealthy. We just choose not to do it and elect politicians who don't want to since they and their donors are wealthy. People made the exact same arguments about the income tax when it was made and they were quickly and soundly proven wrong.

Taxing as little as possible doesn't make any sense. You should tax however much you need to pay for the programs that you want to fund. The first point of order is to decide what to do, not to decide how much to tax. The mantra to tax as little as possible is an ideological one based on a complete lack of faith in government, which I reject as baseless and deriving from a warped perspective of society based on having only grown up in the good times. People love to reminisce about how great imagined anarchistic utopias would be, but that's only because none of those people have ever lived in one.

The one thing I do sort of agree on is your point about sales tax being regressive, but I find it hard to square with all of your other comments endorsing regressive taxation. But even if sales tax is regressive as it currently exists, that doesn't mean we couldn't create a progressive version of it by having different tax rates for different goods, by exempting goods, or by refunding a flat dollar amount of it. But again, we simply lack the will to make our tax system actually progressive.

/r/mtgfinance Thread Parent Link - ebay.com