alt Hacker NewsVAT is the most regressive tax since inflation. Rich people spend basically zero of their wealth. Poor people spend almost all of it. Even though there are exceptions and item-level exemptions, it's still the poor people who feel these prices the most, and it is reflected in spending behaviors in European countries in my experience.
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I see the point, but I don't see what is wrong with that, and I am relatively poor person. I see calls for equality all over the place, but nobody wants to be equal, especially not in taxation - a fix amount (not percent of something) sum per citizen is equal and nobody wants it. Equal rights, equal taxes, equal obligations, no exceptions - be it financial, demographic, military, etc.
This. But this is also by design. So ask your government why it has been designed that way.
I was about to comment something like this. Consumption from a VAT perspective doesn't increase linearly with wealth, so a more wealthy person isn't going to spend and get taxed via VAT 100x more than someone with 100x less wealth, and VAT affects the poor much more than the rich because it's a tax on consumption irrespective of wealth, so the poor pay a larger percentage of their wealth to VAT.
We should just get rid of VAT and replace the lost tax revenue with something that's more equitable, such as a proper wealth tax. It's not like wealth goes away with a UBI.
VAT is regressive when you consider wealth yes, but as I wrote in the piece it's both counterbalanced by the UBI, and indeed there are mechanisms by which VAT is actually progressive. This OECD paper goes into more detail [1]. The short version is: VAT on its own and in practice is regressive but only because of savings. That's pedantic, I know, but it matters for the purposes of how the VAT-UBI loop scales. In particular, it allows you to fund a larger UBI more quickly than with any other funding method.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/reassessing-the-regress...