Must-Read: Marshall Steinbaum: Hottest Tax Idea in Washington Actually Terrible

…instead of taxing wealth or income, the government should encourage people to save by taxing only their spending… Rubio… Lee… Cardin…. Too bad they’re all wrong…. The theoretical arguments in favor of consumption taxes are typically based on the injustice of penalizing thrift by the poor. But those are just fables: Saving is overwhelmingly a pastime of the rich…. [It] might sound great in theory, but one that would be revenue and distributionally neutral would create tremendous smuggling opportunities and thus be impossible to enforce…