> Also, switching to this program would be a one-time double-tax on savings which will disproportionately affect those who've saved more; i.e. "progressive".
i.e. "putting retirees out on the street". Such a bill would need to provide a fix for that case, where someone has a fixed amount of savings intended to provide for themselves in retirement and cannot afford a sudden 10% increase in all prices.
For instance, one possible patch would be to look at people's lifetime income (already tracked by the Social Security Administration), and offer a one-time exemption up to a certain threshold, effectively calling the corresponding savings "already taxed" and providing an exemption. The challenge would be doing that without creating massive additional complexity in the tax code after that one-time event.
(This would only apply to people with post-tax retirement savings. The solution for pre-tax retirement savings is much simpler, since it won't get taxed at withdrawal anymore.)
> I'm still not positive about intergenerational wealth transfers
They wouldn't matter anymore, because they're all on the income side, and taxes would all be on the spending side. By taxing when the money gets spent, rather than when the money gets made, you no longer care where the money comes from.
You also no longer care about people who made their money in other jurisdictions, or many other issues. If you live in a country, you'll need to spend money in that country.
> I'm a big fan of a FairTax-esque approach since it simplifies things dramatically
Hopefully, but there's a pile of additional complexity involved in definition, to deal with suppliers and intermediate goods. There's a ridiculous amount of complexity in the definition of VAT; some of that is unnecessary bought-and-paid-for exemptions and adjustments on item types, but even after avoiding that, there's a pile of complexity involved in what "value added" means.