this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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European tourism to the USA in free fall (i.postimg.cc)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I agree this is stupid but I haven't seen any figures on internal tourism, which would also be taxed. They have theme parks and nature, Miami and a lot of grandparents living there, so might still be a lot of tourism from other states going on now. Although as Americans get pooreer the percentage of people that can afford is getting smaller.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I didn't go into in the main post but yeah, US domestic air travel is down as well, which is a pretty good indicator domestic tourism is also down.

... Also, they want to just generally raise the sales tax, with the idea that this will mostly tax tourists.

But... theres no actual ... mechanism, to differentiate between a local resident sales tax and an out of state or international tourist sales tax.

... So what they want to do is bail out the already wealthier property owners, on the backs of the already poor non property owners, who pay much more of their income toward sales taxes than to property taxes.

It is literally rob the poor to prop up the idiot home and condo owners and corporations with mortgages they can't afford because they thought the housing bubble would never pop.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There are people who say that a high sales tax benefits the poor because rich people buy more stuff but there is also people who say that high sales tax benefit the rich because they have relatively more money 'left over' to buy more stuff. I don't know what would be more fair when it comes to sales tax, but lowering property tax is definitely only beneficial for the people who have enough money 'left over' to own property in the first place. But Florida is ruled by republicans and they say they are there for the working class but their legislation has proven otherwise many times before.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's to do with the proportion of one's income that goes into purchases and the proportion of one's income that goes into savings (which generally ends up as investments):

  • Poor, working class and lower middle class people's income after paying rent or mortgage goes 100% into purchases, so a sales tax hits 100% of their income (after rent/mortgage). These people generally have no savings or just about enough to face a small unexpected event such as a fridge or washing machine breaking.
  • For the rest of the middle class, the proportion of their income that goes into purchases gets lower and lower the higher their income gets and, of course, what's left goes into savings, the last part not being taxed via sales tax (plus when it does end up getting spent, it often ends up in things like Property which is not taxed by sales tax).
  • The rich will easily save 90% or more of their income, plus they can make sure their purchases happen where the sales tax won't hit them (say, they'll buy their yachts in places with no sales tax), so only a small proportion of their income is hit by a sales tax.

Absolutely, the more income people have the more they spend, but spending doesn't grow at the same rate as income and beyond a certain point people just naturally end up earning so much that they don't spend it all or even most of it.

In percentage terms, the poor and working class are the worst hit by sales taxes because, after paying rent and mortgage 100% of their income ends spent purchasing essential goods hence hit by sales tax, whilst the rich are the least hit by sales tax because their income is so vast that they spend only a tiny amount of it on things covered by sales tax.

Whilst in absolute, dollar terms it's not the poor that pay the most in sales tax per person, they're hit the hardest because sales taxes hits all of their income (after rent/mortgage) hence hurts them more, plus that income was already not sufficient to live well enough the first place and sales tax just makes it worse.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Thanks, this makes it clear for me. I think the tax burden shouldn't be spread thinking about who pays the most in the absolute sense but according to how much the tax burden weighs them down. Not being able to save money for a rainy day is definitely a sign the tax burden is too high. I imagine there is plenty of research of what is fair and what is not, also on what is wise policy and what is foolish. But it's so easy to spin these theories to make them seem like something they're not. Paying less taxes is so attractive, people might vote for something that actually hurts them because they're (intentionally) confused about how a certain tax affects them.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

A sales tax is 100% a regressive tax.

What that means is a poor person loses way more of their own income to a sales tax then a rich person loses.

Example:

Poor person has 20k a year, spends 300 (before taxes) a month in groceries, thats 3600 a year.

Say the sales tax is 10%. Ok, that is 360/20000.

1.8% of a poor person's income goes to just tax on groceries a year.

Ok, now someone who makes 80k spends the same amount on groceries.

360/80000 = 0.45% of their income goes toward grocery sales taxes.

Thus the tax burden of a sales tax hits poorer people harder than richer people.

A progressive tax, like most income taxes... well the taxed amount increases as your income increases, so this is basically reversed: a richer person is taxed more in absolute terms than a poor person.

...

A high sales tax does not stimulate rich people to buy more.

All it does is mean poor people buy much less, and rich people buy slightly less, thus shifting the demographic of people buying things.

Whoever told told you that a high sales tax... stimulates rich spending... is economically illiterate, as in, they'd flunk an AP Micro course or a first year of a 4 year degree... that is absolute nonsense.

All it does is filter out the poors, who now have a dramtically tighter budget than the rich, and make it seem like only rich people are coming into your store... because poor people stopped coming in.

Could a Sales Tax be Progressive?

Theoretically, you could have a progressive sales tax... but that would realistically require all POS sales sytems to also pull your income when you swipe a debit or credit card.

Its not totally impossible to do this, but it would be quite complicated to implement, you'd have privacy issues, data security issues, smaller business owners would have to foot a disproportionate cost as compared to large businesses to upgrade their systems... how do you handle cash transactions, id verification, etc.

To my knowledge, no such system has ever been implemented in the US... or possibly anywhere, at a large scale.

Bonus! Property Taxes:

Property taxes vary much more locally and regionally, with many more possible complicating factors.

Basically, some government system or process estimates the value of your home as if you tried to sell it on the market, that year.

Then taxes are applied to that estimated value.

But... lots of governments do the value estimation part in ways that are both absurdly complicated and often quite out of step with actual the actual market, and there are often complex rules determining what triggers a new valuation or when it occurs.

Usually property taxes themselves, once your property value is assesed, are a flat rate based on the assesed value.

So... that too is a regressive tax, that effectively punishes less wealthy property owners more than wealthier property owners...

But there are so manh caveats and complications to any given city or county or state's local property tax laws that it can vary quite significantly.

...

thank you for coming to my ted talk lol

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks, zero regrets for attending this ted talk (ยด๏ฝฅแด—๏ฝฅ ` )

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Oh you replied quickly, I may have still been cleaning up the formatting.

Either way: =D