In my pre-Thanksgiving Examiner column, I took a look at the looming federal budget deficits, which will be augmented if some version of the Democratic health care proposals passes, and then pointed to quotations from highly-placed Democrats in the Obama administration and Congress which suggest that Democrats might plug the deficit with a value added tax. Not many commentators, to my knowledge, have made that point, and so I thought I was informing the reading public of something it had not considered. But maybe people have. Just as my column appeared, pollster Scott Rasmussen reported that 48% of likely voters expect their taxes to go up and only 9% expect them to go down. That’s a vivid contrast with the responses back in January, when only 29% expected their taxes to go up and 21% expected them to go down. About half of American voters, it seems, have caught on to the Democrats’ stuff-the-beast strategy: raise spending to previously unheard of levels and then raise taxes to reduce the deficit. Moral of the story: never underestimate the perceptiveness of the American voter.