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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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So there's actually two things there that sound good to me, that I immediately doubt because if Republicans were in favor of it I have to assume there's something horrible about it...
What's bad about a national sales tax, and banning earmarks? Those kinda sound like good things to me.
Sales taxes disproportionately impact the poor.
First, any tax that's a fixed percentage will be a higher percentage of a person's income even that income is lower.
Secondly, there's a point in "wealth generation" where you don't spend everything you make. Money that you save isn't taxed by a sales tax -- so, again, the less money you make, the more it impacts you.
Regarding "earmarks" it really depends on what it's for. As a blanket statement, "Earmarks Are Bad" is just a small government taking point -- which itself can be understood as an anti-poor dog whistle, since conservatives call support for society's most vulnerable "wasteful spending" -- but you can often hear "earmarks" in reference to defense spending, which is typically a Democrat talking point.
I think that "earmarks" is actually a really interesting word, since, in a practical sense, it never means anything -- or, more accurately, it always means nothing specific but I'm a vaguely specific way. The word doesn't refer to a specific spend, but it refers to a specific kind of spend -- so it sounds much more specific than it actually is.
If a politician refers to a specific earmark, they run the risk of alienating whoever benefits from it; by being exceptionally vague, they can associate their brand with fiscal responsibility without actually doing anything fiscally responsible.
I'm just curious what a world with sales taxes instead of income tax would look like. I'm sure that the poor, and the retired, would be disproportionately impacted. But income taxes are impacting most of us, right up the ass, all the time. And what a waste of time, energy all the tax filing nonsense is. That's not fair, either, and I want to be freed from it.
I didn't express good OR bad. I just listed some of the things that were done.