This article is so flawed and full of misinformation it is almost laughable. The fact that much of the information is coming from government sources indicates what Bozo's we have in Washington. Taxes are not that complicated if you look at them logically and the actual rate that would be necessary isn't that hard to calculate or anywhere near as high as 57%.
First of, you must realize that with only a few exceptions, all taxes are basically sales tax anyway. Whether you own GM stock, are a GM employee, a salesman or a parts vendor, the money you pay in taxes comes from the sale of GM cars trucks and services. The end user supplies the money that you end up sending in as taxes, it is built in to the price of the product or service. Eliminate or lower taxes and the price of the product or service goes down. Incidentally, this is why tax cuts for the wealthy is such a misnomer. Tax cuts end up lowering prices to the consumer because that is where the tax money was coming from anyway.
The easiest way to figure out what a national sales tax would have to be is to look at what percentage of GDP is being taken in as Federal Taxes. Typically this is between 18% and 21% depending on economic conditions. Only a small portion of this is related to non-transactional taxes like the death tax. So even given that the tax code would be massaged to exclude certain items (essential food items for instance) in the silly belief that it would shield the low income people from taxes (a totally ridiculous notion since the cost of taxes, no matter how they are collected is built into the final cost of an item) a sales tax in the range of 20% to 25% would be pretty close to accurate. The interesting thing is that it would not basically affect the end cost of the product since all of the built in taxes would be removed from the original price of the product. The net cost to the consumer would be pretty neutral.
I used to be opposed to sales taxes since it appears that they are regressive. When you stop and follow the real flow of money through the economy, it is fairly easy to see that all taxes are regressive because the consumer is the one that ultimately provides the money to pay the taxes. Changing how taxes are collected does not really change who pays them, it only affects the efficiency of the system and the ability of politicians to bamboozle the public while using the tax code for social engineering.
What kind of tax revolt would we see in this country if we did away with payroll withholding and made everybody pay their taxes by writing a check to the government. You would be suprised how many people I know, well educated people, who think if they get a small refund back that they haven't paid any taxes that year.