If Iraq was about the oil, I'd like to know why we haven't gone into Sudan, which has lots of oil. Or why once we were in Iraq, we bothered to do anything other than pump oil.

And as a Liberal you ignore inconvenient facts. Facts such as the origin of the income tax and how it has not always been around. Or how it was originally passed by liberals as a "soak the rich" amendment (class warfare at its finest) that eventually was being payed by everyone and included a 25% starting bracket within 20 years of its passage. Or shall we look at Social Security, which has been expanded to included people over the years who were never supposed to have been covered under the original scheme. Or Medicaid, which last year cost over $700 billion more than the Medicaid tax brought in. So yes, you do work incrementally.

And typically European, both apathetic and completely misunderstanding. If you do not buy it from a physical store, the store charges the tax and you do not even need to look. It is only for online ordering and mail order that you need to even consider it.

In the US, you can do the same with the exception of internet/mail ordering. Quit trying to make this seem harder than it really is.

So you dislike the tax system that actually lets you see how much the government is charging you for the purchase. And apparently averse to any change in that.

And here you're just being an ass, regardless of it being true or not.

A Use Tax is basically a Sales Tax. A VAT is something slightly different, but with major effects. A Use/Sales tax is a tax levied on the final price of an item. A VAT is levied every time the item is transferred/incorporated all the way up the production chain. For example, the raw materials used in a capacitor placed on a mother board used in a computer. In a sales tax, the final cost of the computer is taxed. Under VAT, there is a tax applied on the price increase at each stage of sale. If you're talking something produced and sold entirely in country, there is no difference. However, anything that is produced outside of the country is not taxed under VAT but is effectively taxed user a sales tax. For items sold outside of the country, the reverse is true. This basically has the end effect of a sales tax treating imports and domestic production equally which a VAT gives a penalty to domestically produced goods for goods sold in country.

You ever look at your annual state income tax form? Most, if not all, have a line item from goods ordered from outside the state such as through mail order catalogs or the internet. If you didn't pay state sales tax on it when you bought it, you are supposed to pay a Use Tax on it. So, Tax Holiday? Not so much. Just a matter of people not paying the taxes.

How about a game a bit more complicated than Monopoly? Start with games by Avalon Hill.

Well, we could start with the UK Libel laws, where the truth is no defense.

Well, we could always start by decreasing the surplus population. I vote we start with anyone posting as Anonymous Coward.

Expanding on the search for alternatives, they also fail to account for changes in technology. Whale Oil was replaced by natural gas. The same will happen when Coal, Oil and Gas start to become scarce. Fusion may or may not be viable by that point but we still have Hydro, Wind and Solar going in the mean time.