Hospital Bill, German style

[DFW]

71. Simple

Another sales tax would be like any other sales tax. It would have to be collected individually on every single transaction. That means millions or tens of millions if transactions per month. Plus: it would affect the citizens of each state differently, depending on how much their own sales taxes are. People living states with high state sales taxes would be unfairly hit, where people living in states with low (or no) state sales taxes would have it easier. I.e. it would hit people living in states like New York, California and Illinois way harder than people living in states like New Hampshire. What Congress would vote for a national sales tax that would punish people for living in certain (incidentally mostly blue) states? Plus the thousands of additional accountants/auditors that would have to be hired to administer the new bureaucracy.

I think that supporting anything of the sort would be electoral suicide. Plus, in every country here in Europe that has a VAT, it has proved to be government heroin. Once they started, almost all at 10% it has only risen, now between 19% and 25% in most EU countries. If the cost of everything went up overnight by 25% in the USAJ, who would boast about voting for that?