Income taxes can be made progressive. Sales taxes are almost always regressive. Businesses need to do a lot more paperwork to document these taxes.
Why don't leftist parties campaign to abolish sales taxes and replace the lost revenue with an increase in a progressive income tax?
Am I missing some critical functionality of sales taxes that income taxes cannot replicate?
Edit: Here's an important feature of sales taxes that a few commentators helped me realize. It's better if we think of a sales tax as a "revenue tax" instead. Let's say we are in a country with multiple provinces. A business sells stuff in province A. However, the business and its owners are both located in province B. If sales tax didn't exist, then all money earned by the business would go to province B's government. Province A cannot enact tariffs and stuff like that. Thus, it puts up a "revenue tax" that is taxed to business for all revenue earned, i.e., a sales tax.
For those wondering, no, a corporate tax is not a revenue tax. It's a tax on profit. Non profits for example, do not pay any corporate tax, but they do pay sales tax (which is basically, revenue tax).
Sales tax is different from customs or exise paid on specific items (alcohol, tobacco, etc.) sales is generally levied on the seller, customs and exsises by the importer or manufacturer, and that is generally where the sin tax goes in and allows the state to influence the market by making supply more risky rather than attempting to simply price people out of demand.
Of course the question is do sin taxes work as a way of influencing behaviour, my gut tells me know, because affordability isn't something on an addict's checklist, but I don't care to do a lit review so don't cite me. What they are good at though is giving the government its share of the whale-meat.
Scotland has been applying a minimum price per unit of alcohol for a little while and it seems to work at least a bit. It doesn't stop addicts, but it does seem to stop some people who maybe are not addicts but do lack a bit of self control
Only allowing the luxury of alcohol induced recklessness to the rich does not seem like a good idea. Further, if we are talking about benefit to society, that it doesn't work on the most corrosive type of damage suggests it is much more about the extraction of money than it is about trying to achieve a net good.
I can promise you that poor people are definitely still getting drunk in Scotland. Just a little less so.
The data is showing how many deaths it prevented; in my opinion, any case that results in death is quite severe enough to be worth addressing regardless of whether or not it is part of a pattern of addiction.
It's totally fair if you think that the benefits aren't worth the drawbacks, that's a fair opinion to hold. I brought it up because it's actual data relevant to the point you were making rather than to definitively say that everywhere should apply the policy.
My issue is in pretending that sin taxes are anything but profiteering on human weakness. If the goal is to stop people dying, then it is limp, ban the advertising, take it out of supermarkets, require ID and impose limits. If the goal is to deal with the social harms of alcohol then it is the opposite of effective, pushing addicts closer to poverty, and hitting the poorest the hardest. Minimum pricing has zero effect on anyone who can afford to shop half way up the shelves.
If the goal is to extract money from drinkers, specifically poor drinkers, then it is just fine. The reason why I focus on those dependant on alcohol is that those are the people underpinning the whole industry, and are the ones that end up paying the bulk of the tax, because they don't have a choice in the matter.