Raw LLM Responses

Yang doesn't know how his key tax, a VAT, actually works. A VAT is specifically designed to NOT tax businesses in order to avoid double taxation. It's a sales tax, collected in stages, with the business stages all getting paid back their input VAT. Because a VAT won't have corporations like Amazon paying into the dividend, they will only get the benefit of the dividend being spent. Amazon would make an extra $60b a year from $3t in added consumer spending. Ironically, that's billions more they could invest into speeding up their automation timeline, putting people out of work even faster. That would also make the likes of Bezos extra billions a year more than he'd ever personally pay into a VAT, speeding up inequality. "a consumption tax because it is borne ultimately by the final consumer. It is not a charge on businesses." "taxable persons (i.e., VAT-registered businesses) deduct from the VAT they have collected the amount of tax they have paid to other taxable persons on purchases for their business activities" "the taxable person is entitled to deduct all the tax already paid at the preceding stage. Therefore, double taxation is avoided" https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/what-is-vat_en "The GST takes into account the cost of inputs – the factors used in manufacturing or production – at each stage of the process to avoid double taxation. Input tax credits enable partnerships, businesses and self-employed workers to recover all GST paid on goods and services purchased for business purposes by deducting them from their GST payments. Final consumers are not entitled to such credits, which means that they pay all the GST on every item purchased. The GST is thus a multi-stage tax on final consumption." http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb0003-e.htm#A.%20Taxing%20Mechanism(txt)