I've never understood this thinking. A state has a certain amount of expenditures in their budget. They have to acquire those funds somehow. If they don't collect income tax, they bump up food tax, or hotel tax, or restaurant tax, or diesel tax, etc. The money is coming out of your wallet one way or the other.
I live in a state without income tax and moderately high property taxes. This arrangement tends to favor the rich, inheritance owners over the working class. In a state income tax state, my taxes are dependent on me working, and a smaller percentage goes to property.
In a property tax state, my taxes are entirely dependent on the property market, regardless of how much or little I make. When there is a budget shortfall the bureaucrats juice the millage rate. Property re-assessments go up, rarely down. And if you owned property for a long while you pay less in taxes than someone younger and on a lower salary.
Don't accuse others of lying when even a modicum of good faith points to them simply holding opinions different from yours.
In this case, they are also right. At least under the assumption of taxation linear to property value.
Thats because richer people tend to spend less (as a %) of their income on housing. I hope that's intuitively obvious: making minimum wage, you're likely to spend 40% or 50% of income on rent. At the other extreme, the Bill Gates of the world spend about a Pentium III rounding error of their income.
It's the same with every other consumption taxes. Often, the first $100,000 in value or so are free. That helps a little, but only for the balance between the poor and the middle class. It's almost impossible to adequately tax the super-rich within this framework.
It depends on your situation. I live in a place where I am able to live without a car, for instance, so local gas taxes don't affect my decision making for whether to live here. Income taxes always will.
Income taxes are generally either flat or progressive. Most consumption taxes are regressive. So you'd expect that a revenue-neutral change from income tax to sales tax would end up benefitting high income earners.
