I pray for the day there is no more cash. Costs too much to print and protect from counterfeiting. Also all the tax cheats who shove unreported cash in there pockets and don't pay their fair share of taxes. Bring it on!!
Also, let's do away with any business deductions and expenses. Tax every business a percentage on total gross sales. Very little accounting. Figure your tax burden when figuring out your sale price of goods or services. Would do away with receipts, decisions on what's an admissable deduction etc. No depreciation crap. Easy and open and fair. Would stop the Amazon's, Apples,etc from paying little to no tax.
Obviously you've never done business in countries with a VAT or similar taxes, nor considered the full implications of your scheme.
Much of what I do touches Latin America, which uses a VAT (value added tax) system. All the tax bureaucracy that for us occurs during the tax filing process, get shifted to the invoicing process. In these countries, invoices are not produced for the customer, but for the government. The government writes all the invoicing standards. Additionally companies are not even allowed to produce their own invoices. Instead they are produced by government approved third party vendors. If you want to make a simple change to an invoice format etc., expect to pay several hundred thousand dollars to these corrupt vendors. This prevents companies from innovating and improving processes.
Most VAT's are, as we measure taxes here, in the 40% range. Of course VAT's are not added on top of revenue, but TAKEN OUT of revenue, so it gets hidden in the prices, but the taxes are so large, everyone knows they are there. Consequently for similar products in LATAM we have to charge multiple of what we charge in North America.
Of course under your system, this effect would be multiplied across vendors. If the manufacturer pays a 30% tax, and the wholesaler pays a 30% tax, and the retails establishment pays that same 30% revenue tax, an original $100 in manufactured goods reaches the consumer at a prices of $219.70, before we allow for any profit margin or expenses of the whole seller or retailer.
As a result, most whole seller would go out of business, and retail would turn to a "company owned" model, where about all that would be left is outlet stores. The parts store you currently work for would go out of business and be replaces with direct outlets of the Chinese and Mexican manufacturers who actually make the parts. Any surviving wholesale operations would move overseas, outside the U.S tax jurisdiction to escape the manufacturer to wholesale tax.
Your plan would collapse the U.S. economy and turn us into a socialist nightmare.
