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).
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.