Economy

We should move away from income taxes. Consider a progressive income tax system, where the first 15k is not taxed, and the next 15k is taxed at a rate of 10%. Start here. Why are we taxing income at these levels?

That is already exactly what we do today. Your personal standard deduction means that the first $10k you earn is not taxed. Everything over that starts in the lowest tax bracket and is only taxed at that level, filling each progressively higher bracket as you go up. Additional dependents increase the starting point of when you get taxed.

When you do your taxes they give you charts to handle this calculation which gives you your "effective tax rate", but those charts are based on this progressive system.

Trade is good when it's taking advantage of geographic advantages in a healthy way: I will trade you maple syrup for lemons. But not when a developed country is just exporting their exploitation: I have health, labour, environmental rules and you don't let's trade... A tarrif to equalize here makes sense.

Very true but it isn't entirely about labor/environmental rules. I think capitalism likes to tell us to blame their failings entirely on those things.

In reality they have a few advantages that our capitalists don't want you thinking about. When you have a billion people in your country you are working with scales that are considerably different. Also countries like China seem to be fine with giant vertically integrated monopolies (probably because they know they have the power to keep their corporations in line) which lets them reduce the middlemen taking their cuts along the way. And of course their giant government subsidies.

And if we have industries that are so important and add enough overhead in cost to our other industries (such that they can't be competitive with overseas monopolies), maybe the government should take those over so they aren't running to make profit instead of adding tariffs that just tax the people. That could put all the other businesses in the country dependent on those base things (power/steel/batteries/etc) on at least a little more level ground.

Tariffs may still be required but let's not blame the entire situation on missing labor/environmental laws when uncontrolled capitalism is taking a big bite out of our end.

Lastly developed economies should tax corporations on revenue (not income), this makes sense once they get to a certain size or share of the market. At the point where they are no longer adding value and instead just using size to hold market position through uncompetitive practices.

I would say it is difficult to make laws that can effectively do this especially since different sectors have different sizes/expected revenues. It would be better if Congress would just do their job to just break up those companies when they get to that point. Or if their portion of the market no longer can foster healthy competition maybe it is time to treat them like a utility.

Sales tax on goods makes sense.

No. Sales and use taxes are inherently regressive; they affect the poor far, far more than they affect the wealthy, and thus harm all of society.

Tariffs don't make any sense, because that cost simply gets passed on to the consumer. The company I work for uses a lot of aluminum; the raw material is imported from China, and is custom extruded to our spec here in the US. Aluminum from the US is prohibitively expensive. If tariffs double the price of the aluminum, then the company we buy it from is going to pass that price on to us, and we're going to turn around and pass it on to our consumers. There's simply no competing industry in the US, and building the industry to compete would take a decade or more. So it's not even creating an incentive to buy American, because you can't.