If it does load, that doesn't mean the NSA isn't still spying on you...

I'll agree with you that taxing income is the wrong way to go, and that taxing consumption is the much better way to go.

However, I completely disagree with arbitrary taxation on certain forms of consumption. It either all gets taxed equally and "fairly" at the same rate, or it's nothing more than government using policy to further select winners and losers amongst their friends.

I also disagree completely with your notion of "fair share". My "fair share" is whatever I choose to purchase with the money I have earned that represents my time, applied skill, efforts, and education, providing I did not use force, coercion, or trickery to obtain. I can have as much of it as I can choose to afford. Should I choose, I should be able to sit on my assets I have chosen to acquire and resell them later at a higher price when supply is low, generating a profit.

I have grown up poor, I never envied others that have been better off than I. Instead, I rose myself up and out to join them instead of wallowing in class envy.

"Fair share", as bad as or worse than "Give back"

Wow, you're concepts of the sustainability of local food sources is... I can't think of a polite way to say that you're nuts.

Modern cities, of which I have lived recently in both rural and urban, do not have the capacity to support their own populations, nor do the populations have the knowledge or experience to sustain themselves on their own as say, 150 years ago. The average population doesn't know how to clean a fish, butcher a pig/cow/chicken, or how to grow and when to harvest plants.

Lets pretend for a moment that there is a sufficient education campaign to teach people how to grow crops. Cities do not have the horizontal surface area capacity to handle sufficient crop growth.

Importing of food stuffs costs fuel, which would be heavily taxed. Harvesting foodstuffs require fuel, which would be heavily taxed. Refrigeration costs electricity, which would be heavily taxed.

I'm sure we could go back to horse drawn wagons using ice to transport much smaller quantities of food stuffs at a time, but that is impractical.

I can only presume you know little of running a business, as regulatory, embedded taxes and other "costs of doing business" and only be absorbed so much before they are passed onto the consumer or the business goes broke. This raises the final cost at retail out of the range of lower income households. Another "cost of doing business" from increased regulatory and embedded taxes is the need to eliminate positions of employees to keep a business afloat. This means another person who is now low income that can't afford the cost of foodstuffs or other products that have risen in price.

Congratulations on your ability to live close to your job. You are fortunate in that regard. However, there are millions of people that must commute long distances, such as all the people that can't afford to live in new york and must travel from jersey. Don't bother going into some "well if gov taxed 1% or forced lower housing costs so they could live in the city they work in blah blah" nonsense, i'm not even going to bother addressing that kind of totalitarianism.

It's adorably naive that your seemingly racist world view completely ignores logistical facts of transportation of goods, food, and energy. Have fun with that, leave the rest of us out of it.

My understanding with VAT, is that it's not just applied at consumer retail level, but also manufacturing and distribution at every step along the way, becoming a snowballing embedded tax, even on food as the resources to produce food are taxed and added into the equation.

I also understand that VAT nations typically also have income taxation.

That's akin to free sodomy with complimentary lube*++

*while supplies last
++ the supply is already gone.

yeah... here's how you didn't think that through far enough:

Taxing fuel means taxing distribution of products, from the food you eat to the clothes you buy. The increased cost of transportation gets embedded into the cost of your consumables. This embedded tax will quickly begin to screw the poor, as the costs of low cost items will increase.

A very large number of americans commute long distances in places where there is no mass transit. I myself commutes 100 miles 5 days a week. My old man commutes about 60 miles daily. We are both middle class. A large number of people in flyover country also have long commutes as they are spread out.

With water, you have farmers that require large amounts to grow food. You've now increased to the cost food (plant and animal), on top of the transportation of feed, and transportation of crops and live stock cost increases.

With electricity, you've increased the cost to run the stores that sell the food, to keep it cold, to run the computers to process the plastic cards. The previously embedded costs of the entire distribution system of raw resources to get food to the store is increased and passed along to the consumer as an invisible tax at every single step.

Now you have priced the lower income groups out of food due to costs, forced them out of jobs as companies attempt to cut costs to reduce the impact on the consumer and regulatory costs, and ... yeah, pretty much made things worse.

Thank you for your attempt at conforming society to your misguided belief system via tax policy, please stop. We like to eat.

who decides what is a bare necessity? that's the problem. Fair tax removes the government from deciding what is a bare necessity and leaves it to the household to decide what it considers a bare necessity.

You are correct, however, one would be well within their rights to be upset at their employer for taking up a more expensive coverage plan that they and others do not agree with, forcing them to pay an extra cost that one could believe does not need to exist. In such a case, the employee has no voice in the matter, as the company would rather stick it to the employees than reverse course and raise the ire of the SJW nutters for "attacking women".

Of course, the better solution is to have health savings accounts with preventative and catastrophic coverage and let the employee decide how to spend their own dollars.

I know i'd certainly not want to pay higher health insurance premiums to support this, bad enough I have to pay for premiums for birth control I will never use. Are free vasectomies throw in and paternity leave? If so, i'd be willing to call it a wash.

I'm pretty sure there will be emails offering a reactor enhancing additive than will ensure swelling to larger reaction chamber capacities without premature vessel containment failure from .ru domains.

The titles will probably read "Boy, won't her energy states be excited!"

Pretty soon, they'll be small enough that you'll hear "Is that a fusion reactor in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?"

Bah, I'm still dealing with Oracle devs that don't use ansi join syntax, use NVL instead of coalesce, love using Not IN clauses, and can't make a human readable tab indented query to save their lives. I'd swear they let tools build queries for them. Not sure, as I refuse to use Oracle's craptastic tools unless there is no other quick way. I can't even get these people to use the oracle psuedo-standard of 'y'/'n' for a boolean flag (or even 1/0), because oracle still doesn't have a boolean data type. So damn frustrating. I hate oracle. Don't even get me started on oracle dates.

Every time a thunderstorm rolls through.
The worst parts of comcast is due to them having a government sanctioned monopoly in many of the areas they are in.

Should I wish to leave them and switch to a another government sanctioned monopoly with slower access speeds, I can switch to Uverse.

I don't want a DMV experience when I need to adjust my service or get support, and all other options having been priced out from government competition, leaving only government monopoly in place.

No Thanks

On top of that, in such an environment, you have companies taking advantage of uninformed politicians to sell them craptastic products and services to 'improve' the local municipal net.

And within a short time period of a few years or less, the government will be injected page breaking "announcements and reminders" into pages, like certain telcos have experimented with.

Finally, you get censorship, bc you know for the kids, in the only remaining provider in town.

Next is the ability of any elected jackass to change policies to benefit his interests regarding content and usage rules, speeds, etc. And there will be no competition.

Hell No. Bad as it is at (most) times, I'd rather have comcrap.

They are only worth as much as someone is willing to pay them to do a given job and/or retain there services; and the person accepts.

Any perceived worth beyond that is measurable in pixie fecal matter.