Except in this case quite literally every tax other than maybe sin taxes are leaps and bounds better than a sales tax. Even terrible taxes like income and payroll taxes are vastly preferable to sales tax when it comes to not disproportionately hurting low-income households. If you want to ensure the wealthy pay their fair share, a sales tax is about as counterproductive as it gets.
Tax things with inelastic supply that rich people and large corporations are more likely to hoard. Land in particular is about ideal for this.
Judging from all the comments here people don’t know what they want. They claim to want fair but then they make a bunch of unfair exceptions for poor people. They claim to want to tax the wealthy but not unless it’s full of exceptions that ultimately benefit the wealthy.
> are leaps and bounds better than a sales tax.
Define better. What should be the goal of taxation in only a numerical and objective way? From most of these comments the answer is something about land and wealth but void of any mention of taxable assets or specifically how to unfairly punish only certain persons.
> What should be the goal of taxation in only a numerical and objective way?
To force the internalization of otherwise-externalized opportunity costs.
> From most of these comments the answer is something about land and wealth but void of any mention of taxable assets or specifically how to unfairly punish only certain persons.
From my comments in particular, the taxable assets would be things with inelastic supply, land being the most notable and prevalent and universally-understood example. Land ownership inherently externalizes opportunity costs onto every other individual member of society, so a tax on land ownership proportional to the rental value of that land (i.e. the value which can be derived from that land, and which others who would use that land are missing out on by being excluded from it - a.k.a. the opportunity cost thereof) would internalize those externalized costs, to everyone's benefit.
As for the "unfairly punish" part, none of what's proposed here is unfair at all. If you're going to claim an area of land for your own exclusive use, then it's only fair that you pay the rest of society your due rent.
That is, to distill the point here a bit: the idea is to penalize behaviors, not persons. For example, the behavior of hoarding land as an investment and speculating upon it is arguably one of the main drivers of skyrocketing housing costs, said costs being especially high for lower and middle class households relative to their income. Taxing the value of land penalizes hoarding land as an investment (indeed, it instead becomes a liability), thus resolving that particular housing cost driver and improving things considerably for the lower and middle classes.
