I don’t get this, the only argument is the like Austrian school taxation is theft argument but in that case all the taxes that income tax haters like are also just as much theft.
You see a new article every week about why we need to get rid of income tax and replace it with some asinine “progressive consumption tax” that allows for poor people to write some stuff off but not other stuff its a mess.
every inane over complicated solution always runs into either not making enough, being to expensive to enforce and calculate or being regressive
even in Europe which comes the closest to this with the use of vats but income tax is still their main cash cow
this is a solution in search of a problem income tax works, economist agree when done right (as in you don’t raise income tax 50% in a day)it has the least distortion, it’s easy to collect and raises massive revenue
In theory, it’s not the most economically efficient. We want people to work, and taxing labor decreases the incentive to work. However, there isn’t any viable alternative given the current circumstances. Labor creates all value in society and you can’t easily hide labor off shore (though I guess that’s what happened with globalization and China).
One should understand that income tax should be a tax on the consumption of labor (just as a tariff is a tax paid by the importer/consumer). Right-wing politicians have made the employee pay the income tax (to decrease acceptance of the system), but it should always be the employer that pays the tax.
If we start to call income tax “labor VAT” or something similar, that will probably solve a lot of misunderstandings.