Right, so this would push the burden off onto others who often dont have as much overall income and therefore they have less spending power. Im not saying your view is wrong, I am simply saying you should recognize and acknowledge that your decision would benefit you and financially hurt others.
There is a minimum amount that all households must spend to realistically exist. Basically, add up basic housing, transportation, food, clothing, healthcare, and communication. Lets say this total is $8000 per year. You want to increase the tax burden on that $8000 that all households spend. This, as a percent of household income, disproportionally affect lower income households.
Again, Im not saying your view is wrong. I am pointing this because it seems some in life dont recognize taxes that help them will hurt others. I think it is important to understand that when I benefit with taxes, it is often because others are hurt.
That is a fair and very reasonable post. But I think the other thing to recognize is that we spend a lot of time pretending that we can dictate tax burden while ignoring the inefficiencies we create. Moving tax revenues from Sales tax to income tax doesn't necessarily move the burden from poor to rich. Nor does moving from income tax to sales tax mean you are raising the burden to the poor. It's going to be very product/service specific, but in general a good chunk of the burden is probably going to be born by the poor regardless. Since a sales/use tax is so much more efficient, it's worth really considering whether it increases the tax burden on the poor that much.
Someone with a high income presumably has that high income because they have market power. If you tell them you are going to raise the cost of them making income, they can presumably use the same market power that allows them to get a high income to also pass on a good chunk of those costs to others. So you might have the choice of collecting taxes from, say, medical services by levying a special sales tax on the service charge, or you might be able to levy a special income tax on the provider. Even though the sales tax looks to be born 100% by the customer and the income tax looks to be born 100% by the provider, the market dynamics are going to have a lot to say about who ultimately pays that tax.
A similar thing happens with ad valorem taxes on rentals. If the housing market is generally in balance for a community, we can raise property taxes and that tax is physically paid by the landlord, not his tenants. That's what most communities do. They don't charge a sales tax on rent; they charge an ad valorem tax against the owner (generally b/c it's easy to collect) and often they charge a higher ad valorem rate for landlords (either b/c the people in favor of it understand the economics and want to tax renters, who are more likely to be poorer, or because they don't understand the economics and think they are sticking it to the rich landlords). In reality, in a relatively short period of time, the landlords are going to pass that tax on to their tenants. Mostly, tenants are going to bear the entire burden of it because people will cut back on other things. To the extent they can't, rents will come down some for lower end units, and that will presumably slightly impact the number of rentals that come on the market in the future. (Or maybe as an alternative they will cut consumption by putting more residents in a given unit, in which their quality of life will come down and landlords will get less money.)
It's really hard to figure out who is ultimately going to bear the burden of that tax, but unless you are looking at a shrinking community, housing can't be provided for less than it costs over the long term, so assuming alternative investments keep roughly the same returns, it seems likely that the costs are going to be paid by tenants and not come out of the returns of landlords. Of course there are lot of frictions, distortions, imperfections and irrationalities in the market, so that may or may not be exactly true, but it's roughly what you'd expect.
