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Direct Consumption Taxes, such as a National Sales Tax (NAT), might make a substantial contribution to Federal revenue, but it's highly unlikely that it could provide more than perhaps 50% of what's required.

One pratical limitation of direct consumption taxes is that they encourage widespread evasion via both informal and semi-formal back market arrangements – experience in Europe suggest that even in the case of "indirect" consumption taxes (such as VAT taxes) the break-even point is tax rates somewhere in the low or mid teens, beyond this point it rapidly becomes more difficult to collect such taxes, creating an culture of widespread tax evasion that in turn evokes increasingly intrusive tax collection methods.

It's also uncertain how well US political and economic culture will deal with the regressively of such taxes (on the average, the lower your income the greater percentage of your income is paid into direct consumption taxes). In Europe such taxes are tolerated in part because they coexist with expectations that a large portion of the revenue collected will be returned to lower and middle-income taxpayers via programs such as government funded medical care, while in the US country taxpayers would likely see a lower proportional return on their tax payments.

But the biggest problem is the rates that would be required to produce a revenue neutral result: if a NAT was sole source of current Federal revenue realistic estimates (accounting for such factors as funding a cut-over of SS to a "privatized" system for taxpayers under 50, servicing the projected Federal debt, and other factors that are often left out in such calculations by their proponents) are in the range of 17-21%, which would be collected in addition to state and local taxes.

Such a tax rate is clearly a non-starter, which is why we are starting to see accounts of more "realistic" plans like those in the WaPO article cited above.

Why isn’t a NAT or a VAT included in such plans as a revenue supplement?

As a taxpayer, do you expect that if the Federal government had an additional major method of taxation your other taxes would be lowered by an equal amount?

The ATP cited above is a very different kind of tax, it achieves its "low" rate by very broad application and being quite progressive (higher-income earners pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes. Also, though he doesn't stress the point, his sort of transaction tax makes it a lot more difficult for sophisticated taxpayers to evade taxation.

That's fine with me – I believe that there is a need in successful market-based economies for relatively high levels of "social investment", and on pragmatic grounds I’d prefer to have it funded from moderately progressive taxation.

But readers here need to be aware that the APT runs strongly counter to the current trend toward increasingly regressive taxation of earned income and reduced or eliminated taxation of unearned income, which most posters here appear to favor.