... which is used in plenty of places in Europe, yes? And not every place in the US uses FPTP. In fact, every election seems to add another locality to the list that use an alternative.
To be fair, Americans (and anyone else) are right to resent sales taxes. And I’m saying that as an American who’s far to the left of what some call “socialism” in Europe. Sales taxes are highly regressive, disproportionately impacting those least able to afford them.
It's not really sensible to look at the regressivity of a tax in isolation.
On the tax side, there are other factors you might want to optimize, like how distortionary the tax is and how effective it is at raising revenue.
On the spending side, a regressive tax + a progressive government redistribution policy can end up being progressive overall. For example, any tax can be made to be as progressive as you want by redistributing some of the revenue as a UBI.
Sales taxes/VATs are very effective at raising revenue and are less distortionary than most of the alternatives. This makes them good for funding redistributive policies. They won't tax billionaires out of existence, but they're a good tool for states to have in their toolbox.
