I wonder if Texas would be a good location to try my population density index tax. So income tax sucks. Punishes working. It literally makes you a slave to the government because the definition of a slave is not being able to keep the product of your work. Sales tax and VAT taxes suck. It is a regressive tax. It punishes businesses form using each others services when different companies have different expertise. It leads to more expensive and lower quality products. There is a reason why Walmart won a world wine competition against Europeans with a bottom dollar wine, against top dollar wines. Trying to do everything yourself to avoid the VAT tax leads to a more bespoke product. It also leads to an amateurish and crappy product. Property taxes suck. They punish you for improving your land, and require you to get permission from the government to make any improvement lest an improvement goes unnoticed. They also punish large property owners in rural areas whose land doesn't have a lot of current demand but is still valued high because it might some day in the future. Paying for that possible some day in the future today when your land isn't paying you dividends now is silly. So here is the idea. Some think property tax is the best of the above taxes, but it does have those problems. Instead you tax on total area of land (so improvements are welcome and unpunished), but you adjust the rate based on population density (index). Live in the zeroth percentile population density, no taxes per acre. People who live in the 100th percentile would pay double per acre as those in the 50th percentile. Maybe the curve could be played with. Huge incentive to build sky scrapers though.