USA had both federal and state VAT's

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
When Richard Nixon became President in 1968, his administration considered a federal Consumption or Value Added Tax (VAT), under which revenue to be shared with state and local governments to reduce their reliance on property taxes and to fund education spending.

A task force was established to consider the introduction of such a tax, most of them reported back that VAT shouldn't be adopted as a substitute, in whole or in part, for the existing federal tax structure. The POD is that this task force recommended that a VAT be introduced, to replace some federal taxes (including the Gasoline Tax and various duties). So by the end of the 20th century both the federal and many state governments (which come around to conclude a VAT is more efficient in revenue collection than sales taxes) have combined VAT rates between 10-20%.

Could some US states instead of having state income and company taxes, instead rely on a VAT for a big slice of their revenue?
 
Less state autonomy, for one. What Washington giveth, Washington can take away. With the present system, there is more of an ability of the states to give the feds the finger.
 

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
Less state autonomy, for one. What Washington giveth, Washington can take away. With the present system, there is more of an ability of the states to give the feds the finger.

In this TL the recommendation would be that a federal VAT would just replace certain federal taxes, as opposed to state taxes. The states in turn introduce their own VAT taxes to reduce reliance on property taxes.
 
so, what's the difference between sales taxes and VATs? how are they collected?

As per Wikipedia:

Wikipedia said:
Value added tax (VAT) in theory avoids the cascade effect of sales tax by taxing only the value added at each stage of production. For this reason, throughout the world, VAT has been gaining favor over traditional sales taxes. In principle, VAT applies to all provisions of goods and services. VAT is assessed and collected on the value of goods or services that have been provided every time there is a transaction (sale/purchase). The seller charges VAT to the buyer, and the seller pays this VAT to the government. If, however, the purchaser is not an end user, but the goods or services purchased are costs to its business, the tax it has paid for such purchases can be deducted from the tax it charges to its customers. The government only receives the difference; in other words, it is paid tax on the gross margin of each transaction, by each participant in the sales chain.
In many developing countries such as India, sales tax/VAT are key revenue sources as high unemployment and low per capita income render other income sources inadequate. However, there is strong opposition to this by many sub-national governments as it leads to an overall reduction in the revenue they collect as well as a loss of some autonomy.
In theory sales tax is normally charged on end users (consumers). The VAT mechanism means that the end-user tax is the same as it would be with a sales tax. The main difference is the extra accounting required by those in the middle of the supply chain; this disadvantage of VAT is balanced by application of the same tax to each member of the production chain regardless of its position in it and the position of its customers, reducing the effort required to check and certify their status. When the VAT system has few, if any, exemptions such as with GST in New Zealand, payment of VAT is even simpler.
A general economic idea is that if sales taxes are high enough, people start engaging in widespread tax evading activity (like buying over the Internet, pretending to be a business, buying at wholesale, buying products through an employer etc.). On the other hand, total VAT rates can rise above 10% without widespread evasion because of the novel collection mechanism.[citation needed] However, because of its particular mechanism of collection, VAT becomes quite easily the target of specific frauds like carousel fraud, which can be very expensive in terms of loss of tax incomes for states
 
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