That is the point of consumption-based taxation: it should hurt everybody when the feds spend money!
Your misguided tendency to subjectively favor one group (lower income earner in this case) over any other group is what has gotten us into this horrible mess of debt.
The efforts of otherwise decent folk such as yourself to shelter millions of voters from the pain of spending is why we have so fricking much spending.
What makes matters worse is that increasing amounts of money are stolen from Peter in order to pay Paul for doing nothing. Which means those voters not only don’t have a reason to care about cutting spending, they now have a great interest in keeping it high and growing.
I see what you are saying, but if you are not favoring the lower income group you are favoring the higher income group based on how you decide to collect the tax.
In this VAT scenario a guy earning 30k a year spends most of his earnings just to live. Therefore he is paying $3,000 income tax and on top of that he is paying $4320 for VAT Tax. That is $7320 in taxes which means his taxes are 24% of his income. And at the same time a guy making 100,000 gets hit with the same 10%, so he is out $10,000, but he only spends a portion of his income on things that allow you to live, so lets say he spends the same amount, $27,000, so his Vat tax is also $4320, but the % of his income taken away in taxes is only 14%.
What incentive do politicians have to make taxes more painful?
Sure, maybe Ron Paul or his conservative equivalent might want to send a message. Paul used to file all sorts of bills that never made it to the floor for a vote. These regressive sales taxes are even more hopeless than ending the Fed or legalizing pot. Actually, the latter might happen in our lifetimes. It sure has a better chance than a VAT or national sales tax.