The 16th Amendment to our Constitution was enacted in 1913, allowing Congress to levy an income tax, which was, in theory, suppose to be a progressive income tax. However, our income tax has over the years become manipulated, bent, distorted, corrupted, and had all other sorts of unfortunate ills applied to it, so that the effect of the income tax has become that those that can most afford to pay a higher percentage of their income for taxes, instead often are able to pay substantially lower taxes than they ought to, which is hardly fair.
There is, however, another way to tax people in America, which could accomplish much of what the progressive income tax was meant to accomplish, and that is taxation by consumption, which can be done by a progressive sales tax. In America, there are items that can be bought, such as groceries, that are not subject to a sales tax, other items that are taxed at the time they are bought, with the sales tax being added on to the price of the good at the cash register, and then there are sales taxes which are hidden within the price of the good, such as with gasoline and airfares.
A progressive sales tax should be exactly what it purports to be, with higher tax rates on items that cost more money, and/or are expensive to begin with, and/or are priced substantially above the norm. For instance, homes are subject to property taxes, but not to a national sales tax. There isn't any reason why homes that are being sold for, let's say, thrice the median price, in a particular metropolitan area, that those homes shouldn't be additionally taxed at a certain progressive percentage rate, since the obvious implication is that the buyer of said house has the means to afford it and therefore should "pony up" the additional sales tax to do so. Further to the point, homes that are sold at perhaps 5x the median price should be taxed at an even higher rate, and so forth, in a progressive and logical manner. Vehicles that are sold in America are subject to a sales tax, in States that have a sales tax, but this should be augmented with a national sales tax on vehicles that exceed a certain price point. Again, the tax would not affect those that purchase vehicles at that price point or below, but would affect those buying above that point and for those purchasing vehicles that retail for prices that are well above the mean, the sales tax would be progressively higher.
The principle behind the progressive national sales tax is to not add any additional burden of taxation to those that fall within the middle class or below, but instead to make those that can afford to purchase goods that are considered luxury, upgraded, or extravagant merchandise to pay a tax premium for having done so. The luxury tax for vehicles in the United States was tried previously in 1990 and by 2002 the tax had expired, but it is high time to pass it again. As reported by CNBC.com for 2014: "This year, automakers are on pace to sell more than one million vehicles in the U.S. with transaction prices of at least $50,000."
The proposed progressive national sales tax would not replace our income tax, nor would it affect the majority of Americans, but it would affect those that can most readily afford to pay such a tax, and it would help to redistribute those monies within America.