It's actually quite simple to understand.
23% inclusive is equivalent to 29.87 exclusive. If your point is that this is intended to fool anyone, well, who? Most of them are still in pre-K.
The best way to analyze the tax is to compare it to now. How would you do that?
Retail sales today are taxed 'exclusively', as you call it. Everywhere, in every case bar perhaps some special offers occasionally.
If the proponents were not intending to deceive -- which they are, the 23% figure is a fantasy at retail -- they would quote the honest tax rate and state the proposal in a manner consistent with everyday retail sales practice.
The best way to analyse anything is to begin by stating the proposition honestly. Joe Citizen doesn't think in terms of markup, or 'inclusive' tax rates as you would have it.
Anyone who thinks that the Regress can't and won't game this alleged 'fair tax' at least as badly as the abominable income tax as now operated, is the sorriest and most naive SOB possible. Why substitute one shell game for another, until the 16th Amendment is repealed, eh?
Because if you don't repeal the 16th for starters, you will, sure as the devil, wind up with both an income tax and a sales tax. You think not? Rubbish -- when have the Regress ever failed to impose another tax when they could get away with it? Right. Never. To believe otherwise is simply to be purblind.
Were I you, I should be quite wary of accusing someone of a lack of understanding. This seems to be a bit of projection on your part.
Not understand it? I understand both it and the means being used to promote it all too well, and the ultimate result of imposing it, too. Don't flatter yourself, boyo.
It would be the very first sales tax calculated and displayed as tax inclusive.
That’s why many are convinced that is being deceptively marketed as a tax inclusive sales tax, because the percentage sounds lower that way, and no other sales taxes are calculated that way.
Income taxes are calculated as tax inclusive because all the money you use to pay the tax is included as part of your gross income, and if you paid your income tax with money that was tax exclusive, that money would also be considered to be part of your income, making it tax inclusive.
Sales taxes, OTOH, are ALWAYS calculated as tax exclusive because the tax you pay is in addition to the price you pay for the items or service.
The so-called Fair Tax is being deceptively marketed, and this is one of the deceptions being used. The fact that the Huckster is on board with it is a further indication of the deception being used.