Watch collectors will spend anything...just as will collectors of anything will. OTOH, the LUXURY TAX, if you recall, wiped out yacht makers and all kinds of other makers of luxury items and the jobs of those who made them or kept them up.
That $500 figure you used, is off; unless you head a very large family.
Unlike the usual welfare family, I could make nutritious and delicious meals on little, but refuse to give up some of the treats. But food is the least of most people's worries, re the VAT. Clothes, even cheap ones ( maybe more so the cheap ones, because they don't wear as well as expensive ones do! ), with VAT as well as local taxes, will raise the prices that most people will be very unhappy about.
The thing about ANY taxation, is that it can and usually does get raised. The VAT wouldn't do away with local property, income, and sales taxes. There are also examples of states that didn't have sales tax, but added it, or played games with lowering existing sales taxes a bit, when they instituted a state wide income tax, which then becomes a double whammy.
Making all stores and service givers ( doctors, dentists, barbers and hairdressers, etc. ) an arm of the Federal Government, is not a good idea.
>>Watch collectors will spend anything...just as will collectors of anything will.<<
These aren't collectors, just regular yahoos who have lots of disposable income.
>>>OTOH, the LUXURY TAX, if you recall, wiped out yacht makers and all kinds of other makers of luxury items and the jobs of those who made them or kept them up.<<<
What you're missing is that while more taxes would be imposed on the product at sale, LESS taxes would be imposed throughout manufacturing of the product.
What we saw with the luxury tax and the yacht makers was the effect of having both sets of taxes imposed simultaneously.
None of those you mention are an "arm of the Federal government", but are actually paid to collect the FairTax and send it to their state unlike at present when they ARE required to be an "arm of the Federal government" (your parlance) as an unfunded mandate.
Additionally, the FairTax is nothing at all like a VAT. The VAT is a completely different type of tax used in EU countries and is like an income-based tax in that it cascades and embeds some costs of the tax system into the prices of goods - as does our own income tax system.