The payer incurs the transaction fee.
The payer incurs the transaction tax.
But if you want the fee to apply to both sides of the transaction then it would be reduced to 10.5%.
How about investment-oriented transactions? Buy stock, pay 21% of the value of the entire stock purchase. Sell stock, pay on the entire transaction amount again (I guess the “buyer” pays here too? Or maybe a 50/50 split like with the payroll-oriented proposal?). None of this “capital gains” BS.
Tax consumption on a sliding scale. The bigger and more frivolous the consumption is the higher the tax rate.
Is fair everyone pays. Buy more shit, the more you pay.
Isn’t it rather that spending money on communication, not the possession of money, counts as speech?
That’s just the rich people/right wingers arguing that they should only be taxed on what they spend, to “be fair”. But it isn’t fair at all.
If we take this idea, you buy a widget for $1.00, and pay 21% sales tax. You resell the widget for $1.10, and the buyer pays 21% sales tax.
Note that this makes lots of businesses like regular grocery stores impossible, because you can’t buy and resell items unless you pass along that 21% tax. And it makes certain types of vertically integrated businesses vastly more profitable. If you own the mine that digs up the ore, and the smelter that smelts the ore, and the factory that turns the ore into widgets, the distributor who transports the widget, and the store that sells the widgets to the end customer you only pay tax once, when you sell the widget to the end customer. If the miner, smelter, manufacturer, distributor and retailer are all separate businesses that each pay 21% tax at each transaction then total tax by the time the customer gets the item is 114%.
And so we have the value-added tax, which is a sales tax, but it only taxes the difference in value between the items you buy and the items you sell, not the gross value of the transaction. So if you buy the widget at $1.00 and sell it at $1.10 you aren’t taxed at 21% of $1.10, you’re taxed at 21% of $0.10.
A value added tax instead of an income tax would encourage production and tax consumption.
Now ask if Republicans are in favor of a value added tax.
The answer is, of course, no, because a value added tax is socialism.
This last part is incorrect.
It is true that most excursions were small, but there were a VAST number of US military deployments outside American soil.
Here’s an interactive map showing the same information.
Let me speak as a broker, one thing that’s always disallowed here is…
Stocks and Bonds.
The concept of a national sales tax always seems to disallow financial instruments. It’s almost as if the people who run the financial system want to move the burden over to someone other than themselves. That couldn’t possibly be the case, right?
So, looking at some data from the World Bank, the total amount of equities traded inside the US in 2016 was 42.071 trillion dollars. I’m happy to have done some of that. Yay for paying my mortgage and such.
However, say we taxed that at 5%. My state sales tax (SC=6%) exceeds that.
42.071T
Times 5%
Equals: 2.1035 Trillion dollars
That leaves $1.6 Trillion for all other sales to make up. Make sure the national sales tax applies to all transactions, stocks, groceries, homes, cars and so forth with no exemptions and I think we might be able to get there.
Non-starter, of course, for various reasons, but the numbers work out.
What difference does that make? It’s still a tax on your pay. It’s the IRS getting a cut of your paycheck.
Living in a free society that guarantees rights and enforces the law without paying taxes is theft. So anyone who thinks taxes are theft should leave and go live somewhere that doesn’t have taxes.
Define “modern society”. Please don’t tell me it’s what you have when you tax at the rate we currently do.
As for the OP… is a tariff not a tax? I only ask because people suggested that as an alternative to taxes (I think).
The currency in my pocket has stuff written on it that strongly implies that it was printed by the US Government. That matches my understanding of how it came into existence. It appears to be “mine” only within the context of me playing an economic game, and the game has some rules. One of the rules is “you don’t get to take money out of other people’s stacks without their permission”, I’ll grant you that, but the rule about what happens if someone does that anyway involve armed enforcement personnel who work directly for the government. So the government prints the money and the government provides the security force that protects me from other people swiping my money. It appears that one of the other rules is that the government takes some of my money to pay the security force with. I’m oversimpifying things a bit, but that’s the gist of it. I don’t have to play the money game at all. No one is forcing me to. I could conduct all my interactive transactions on a non-monetary basis.
I say this as an anarchist. I don’t regard government as we know it as inevitable. But, bloody hell, if you’re going to sit at their tables you have to play by their rules. Money is not a natural substance like water or air such that it existed before there was government to come along and demand some of it as their just due. Money only exists because there is a government.
Are you playing the game in US dollars? Seems to me a royalty is owed in the vein of the copyright issues that plague the movie and music industry (and this board). Just because you can make a electronic copy does not exempt you.
Seems to me that the original tax was levied on the land, construed to be the property of all, and those who used it for gain paid a rental to the collective owners. There is a movement to go back to only taxing real property.
Think about it. Let’s go back to my original premise which that the buyer pays the transaction fee.
When I buy $100 worth of widgets, I also must pay a $21 fee to Uncle Sam. Total out of pocket cost to me, $121.
When my employer purchases my time from me for $10,000 a month, she pays me $10,000 and then pays Uncle Sam $2,100 for the transaction fee.
It’s not coming out of my paycheck, my employer must pay it because he is purchasing time from me.
You have the right to remain silent right 
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It makes little difference which side of a transaction the tax is levied on; the economic effect is pretty much the same.
A paycheck of $121 which suffers a $21 income tax means that you get $100 in your pocket for doing work which must be worth (at least) $121 to your employer.
A paycheck of $100 which suffers no income tax but attracts a payroll tax of $21 (which your employer must pay) means that you get $100 in your pocket for doing work which must be worth (at least) $121 to your employer.
In both cases, you’re doing work with a value of >$121 dollars, but only receiving $100 remuneration. The government is taking $21 of the value that your work produces.
So if we switch from an income tax system to a transaction tax, you expect your employer to give you the same salary you get now, and pay the transaction tax on top of that? Good luck. More likely, your employer will still pay you $10,000 including tax. Your take-home pay will go down to $8,264, and your employer pays $1736 tax on it.
p.s. I said your take-home pay will go down, but it’s probably close to that value already, after you pay the taxes. So nothing really changes. Your employer still spends $10,000 on you, and you still get about $8300, and the IRS still gets about $1700.