By Richard Walrath

What does a national sales tax mean to somebody who can go anywhere in the world to buy anything he/she wants?  Tell me, how do you tax something that is bought in another country?  If you’re going to do it through customs, you’d have to hire hundreds of thousands of people.  How can they tax me for something if I just have it shipped to me from overseas?  How would the government even know about it?

Just a couple of problems with that for those of us who can’t afford to shop in other countries.  As the dollar cheapens, we need more and more of them to buy less and less.  How are y’all doing trying to accumulate more and more of them?  If a cheaper dollar makes our goods easier for foreign countries to buy, why does our trade deficit remain so high?   A cheaper dollar ought to mean an increase in tourism from other countries.  It’s not happening.  That may be because nobody likes us, but it’s not helping this country. 

Even the cheap stuff from China is getting expensive.