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Sales taxes are known to be a form of regressive taxation (whereas income taxes are considered progressive). Regressive usually refers to impacting lower incomes more, while progressive taxes impact higher incomes more.

In simple math, low income persons have less disposable money available for purchases of any sort (whether necessities or otherwise). A greater portion of a low income person's income gets directed to basic necessities by default. The staples that one needs to just get by in the world for example do not have any impact on a high income person in terms of cost in relation to their income level. Thus if you place a consistent sales tax on goods across the board, it's going to be felt more severely by lower income individuals. For example, a 6% tax on milk, bread, heating oil, gasoline, clothing, or numerous other goods considered a necessity, is going to be felt significantly by somebody earning $15,000 per year (and barely noticed by somebody earning $250,000 per year); it's ultimately due to the difference in disposable incomes between low income and high income persons. Income taxes are hyper progressive in most of the industrialized world with the intention to balance such differences out. For example in the United States, the bottom 40% of income earners pay on average zero federal income tax (and the top 1.3 million income earners, pay as much in federal taxation as the bottom 130 million earners).

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Q: How does a sales tax affect a low income person?
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What is a graduated income tax?

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