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If your self-employed, you collect money from other people in exchange for the goods or services you offer. That transaction would certainly be a taxable event.

So who is responsible for accounting the transaction, collecting the tax and transmitting it to the government? The guy who just wrote a check for his groceries? I don't think so. I assume it's the person who is PAID. That's the business owner.

Now you can say that it's no different than collecting a state sales tax, but what about transactions that here-to-for have not had a sales tax levied? Let's say you collect rents. Are YOU going to be responsible for paying and reporting to the government the taxes on every cent you receive, or is the rent payer? Forget the "income". It will fall to the person collecting the money. You won't be paying taxes 1-4 times a year. Will you have to account for it on a daily basis?

What if Mom leaves the old beater car to junior in her will? Mom won't be around to pay on that transaction. Will junior owe the sales tax on the value of the transaction?

I'm just saying that such a taxation scenario is going to make very profound changes in our lives, and may call upon a large segment of this society to account -- in minute detail -- for every transaction. We would do well to seriously contemplate the reprocussions.

You are correct about the impact it will have on our lives but 99.9% of them are positive.

Take the rent collector, or property owner more precisely. Yes, the taxes on that are remitted by the collector, and he is paid a percentage of it for doing so, but the renter actually pays it, as renters do now but unknowingly. However, with the present system the landlord has to pay tax on the income from that property so he must keep up with it anyway. In addition, in order to minimize his tax he has to deduct his depreciation and all his expense in maintaining his property, including the costs of a rent collector if he uses one instead of doing it himself. Of course, all those costs are necessarily added to the rent he charges or he would not be able to be in that business.

So, the renter pays the tax, as he does now anyway but it is buried in the rent payment, and the rentor remits the money to the government in a way that is much easier and less expensive to determine.

Back to the grocery store. Not all items there are taxable so the grocer has to know, or his computer does, what is and what isn't taxed and how much for each. Then he must determine to whom the money goes. With the NRST all will be taxed and all will be taxed the same, making it much simpler for everyone. All legal residents of the US will receive a prebate check to cover the cost of the tax on necessities up to a certain level.

The old car will not be taxed because all items are taxed at retail, paid when the car was new, and taxed only once, when it was new.

It is really much easier and simpler than what we are now doing. The big difference is that it will all be visible where many of the taxes we pay now are hidden.