Unless you're Mel, in which case you make awesomely unintuitive and necessarily complex systems to save one or two clock cycles in the inner loop, and become a legend.

You're mixing income tax with consumption tax. If you want to tax income, tax income. But if we're taxing consumption, then those who consume more pay more than those who consume less, and those who consume least because they have the least to spend pay the least in taxes because of the baseline exemption. The upper middle class guy who's busting his butt to pay off his student loans, and who saves as much as he can, is not going to pay a disproportionate amount in taxes. (Or are we going to tax his student loan payments as consumption, even though he paid consumption tax while living on those loans? What about deposits in a savings account, or stock purchases? If we're going to do that, we may as well just call it an income tax, because that's what it is.)

If he pays off his student loans and still chooses to live modestly, he continues to pay a low tax rate. If he instead decides to start living large, then he'll start paying more in taxes. Either way, he essentially chooses his tax bracket, because he chooses every day what to buy, and how much to spend on it. This is especially true if we're giving him a front-loaded exemption on expected costs for rent and groceries. In other words, we're not taxing him for living, eating, and having shelter, and we're not taxing him for working and earning money. We're taxing whatever life style he chooses above and beyond the baseline. This tax is progressive in that people who choose to live modestly or who cannot afford to live extravagantly pay very little in taxes. Those who are able and choose to live extravagantly pay much more in taxes. Yes, you could have a billionaire who pays no taxes because he chooses to live in an efficiency and drive an '86 Yugo. That's only a problem if you believe that the government owns all income, and is naturally entitled to its "fair share," because class warfare or whatever. I prefer the tax theory of take from people the very least necessary for government to function. And I suspect there would be very few billionaires living tax free under this system, because it has an actual lifestyle cost to them. The only cost now for billionaires to live tax-free is they pay their accountants and lawyers $900/hour to get creative with shell entities.

2nd potential mechanism. Due to competition for rare leadership positions, serfs showing leadership potential are killed outright, leaving behind only those with brains enough to do the job that the lord wants them to do. Once a dynasty and traditional economy are established, eight nor nine generations of this and you'll end up with a genetic separation between "noble blood/highborn" and "serf/lowborn" populations.

For an extreme comedic version of this, see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCscVT3d-EEQsq-5rPozTyJw/, these English actors portrayed the four class English system perfectly, complete with simulated IQ levels.

In feudalism, and in certain forms of tribalism, the chief/King and his family eat first, and then everybody else eats what is left over from their table. (in Calapuya Chinook, the title of the chief was the Hias Mucktymuck- quite literally "the dude sitting at the head of the table", from which we get the saying "Lord High MucktyMuck"). I'd call that a very powerful selection mechanism.

I like this. It also fits the Cain and Abel hunter-gatherer vs agriculturalist interpretation.

1. You misunderstood me. I was saying you could come up with a really long list of exceptions to consumption tax without being more complicated than our current labyrinthine tax code.

2. I'm not arguing in favor of progressive taxes. Again, I was just pointing out that there is plenty of room for a consumption tax to get really complicated without being more complicated than the mess we have now.

And no, if you want to make a consumption tax regressive, you don't have to make it complicated. You can exempt the first $X of purchases, where $X is some "living wage" line according to some politician's favored theory. You now have a progressive tax. Perhaps not progressive enough to wage effective class warfare, which means the Democrats will hate it. But the good news is, Republicans will hate that it doesn't have enough loopholes for their monied cronies to avoid paying any taxes at all. So maybe I'm in favor of it after all. I'm in favor of almost anything that those clowns in Washington are all unified in hating. And since everybody would be helping to carry the load of the government they ask for, the big winners in this system are the upper middle class, who are currently getting screwed from both ends of the income spectrum.

Yes, most of the services are not available here either - and I'm less than a mile from Philly, so it isn't about being out in the boondocks.

Ooops. I'm not a contractor - that was meant to say "ASK a contractor...".

It's better at extortion than at unbiased advice.

As a contractor for the Angie's List literature that they send professionals. It is really slimy.

I suspect that evolution is involved. Those who have power in society are making the decisions and thus NEED the larger brains. Those whose grandfathers were ditch diggers and under 99% of the societies ever designed would be ditch diggers themselves, didn't need big brains and in fact were better able to survive without them.

Have you seen our tax code? When I took Federal Income Taxation in law school, I had to get a copy of the tax code, and it was about six inches thick. (I don't remember, or care, if or how much it was annotated.) That's a mighty long list of exceptions to consumption tax.

But consumption taxes will never take on, because the tax code is really about control. If I grant tax favors for certain preferred behaviors, I can exercise a phenomenal amount of control over what you do. If I'm a power-grubbing statist anywhere on the purple spectrum, that's much better than merely influencing what you buy.

"one psychiatrist" is not a valid citation. Point me to a name, a study, and some literature to explain why this discovery hasn't taken the medical world by storm, I'm always happy to expand my knowledge.

Therein lies the great racing divide: vehicles that are essentially identical and thus, in theory, the driver is the difference versus real manufacturer's vehicles so the driver / car combination becomes more important. NASCAR, for example, uses the former model and thus a good driver combined with effective cheating is the route to success. Endurance racing tends to the latter along with having various classes so cars of equal capability race against each other.