I'll repeat myself from another thread, since this post has been repeated on other threads:
Believe me, I have no quibble with mashing the national sales tax proposal as hard as possible to make sure we are not getting into something terrible. So far, I'm still open to the NST and see several positive things it would do for our country and our continued freedom.
Criticisms such as the one above strike me as sooooo 20th century.
State and local governments, and online retailers, manage to collect sales taxes everyday and this process is getting easier, cheaper, more efficient and more failsafe all the time.
Heck, I've lived in Europe and paid a lot of VAT and I can tell you the European VAT system is -- on a good day -- in the 19th century. They had a VAT when merchants had to add up pfennigs with a stubby pencil and stuff boxes full of receipts for the VAT man. IOW, their VAT bureaucracy is largely an artifact of when it began and, then, the lethal inertia of all bureaucracies.
We won't be needing to repeat that here.
Amazon collects sales tax in a whole bunch of states, at all kinds of different rates, and I don't see an Amazon Sales Tax Department taking over the world and choking our freedom.
Further, the European analogy breaks down because the Europeans (even when they had their own countries, before the EuroZone) did not have anywhere near the political means of resisting tax increases, nor did they, frankly, have the mentality to resist.
The fact is they are peoples that have *never* been free; Socialism is the best deal they've ever gotten in their entire history. Americans, on the other hand, are the only people in the world who have never been anything but free. That affects how we fight. (A very interesting piece by a German economist related to this idea is here: Obama's Misguided Approach: America Has Become Too European.)
As an aside, I was in Germany when the government raised the gas tax by a huge percent, seemingly overnight, and no one said a word. I remember thinking, good grief, what a difference between Germans and Americans -- if a state tries to raise its sale tax by a penny, much less by 75%, there's all hell to pay.
Which is a very salient point as to how any national sales tax would be kept in check here.
Thanks for an intelligent and civil post.
Great point. And it explains why Europeans cannot really understand Americans and vice versa. And this did not happen overnight; it is been going on for a loooooong time.