>>>>With APT you have to stop and do the math. The answer to will a prescription drug bought by a poor person be taxed - the answer is YES - how horrible. But the $70 purchase will be taxed about 18 CENTS and NO FICA will be taken from his/her paycheck.<<<<
I'm certainly no economist, but I can see something very deceptive about this proposal. We all know that the consumer ultimately pays all taxes. We pay the taxes that the producers have paid all through the process of bringing a product to market through the cost of the item. It would be no different with this tax. So the $70 prescription you are talking about would have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 today?
If your proposed tax would reduce my share of taxes by 70 times what I pay now, all those taxes I would no longer pay outright would have to be paid by some other means (since we know the government is not going to operate on 70 times less money). This means they would have to be paid by all the transactions made to produce the product I buy, which will be passed along as increased costs.
It may SOUND like I'm paying almost no tax, but my buying power would be no more than now, and perhaps even less. I don't see how this is better than an NRST, and in fact would be worse because even a very tiny tax increase would be added to every transcation made in producing a product and therefore increase the cost by many, many times the percent of the tax increase.
It doesn't matter how small it is, the implementation of it would put in place a horrible system of full government control.
I would also like to point out that the income tax, when first introduced was also miniscule. But once the system is there, all the government has to do is keep increasing it.