Remember when Barack Obama pledged he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone who made under $250,000? Remember when the Tax Day Tea Parties were all a bunch of nonsense because Barack Obama had yet to raise anyone’s taxes? Perhaps the protesters were more prescient than they’re given credit for. While their critics were indulging in the fantasy of a liberal president with a projected $9.3 trillion deficit over the next 10 years and a hankering to socialize the health care system who resorts to something other than tax hikes to pay for it all, the tea partiers were residing in the real world. In that world, a liberal president with a $9.3 trillion deficit, looming entitlement disasters, and dreams of creating a universally crappy but expensive health care system, floats a value-added tax. This is what “fundamental tax reform” might look like under a Democratic Congress and president:
The White House claims in the story that a VAT is “unlikely to be in the mix” for paying off Obama’s health care costs, but if personnel is policy, we should be afraid:
Fed Chairman Paul Volcker has also endorsed Yale professor Michael Graetz’s suggestion that a 10-14-percent VAT would exempt families making under $100,000 from the income tax and lower rates for others as “a sensible plan for reform.” When conservatives and libertarians have pushed for a national sales tax-the Fair Tax, as its called by proponent Neal Boortz- the tax is designed to take the place of an income tax, and some supporters even suggest repealing the 16th amendment to insure that Americans don’t get stuck paying both the sales tax and an income tax. Alas, that latter nightmare scenario is exactly what the VAT-touters are pitching, albeit with vague promises of what we’ll get in return:
Remain extremely skeptical, folks. No matter how much lovely alliteration Obama uses to describe this plan, it’s just another pathway into your wallet for the federal government. It’s just another source to tap for revenue when they’re unwilling to make “tough choices.” It will go up and up, and the relief the nation sees on the corporate income tax or the income tax as a trade-off will be precious little in the Congress we’ve got now. It should also be noted that the VAT costs $3 billion just to collect in Canada, according to the National Post, on top of the added cost to every single item you buy, every day. Luckily, because the VAT is a highly visible tax and disproportionately affects the poor, constituents and even their tax-happy Democrat representatives are likely to be wary about enacting one. Heck, even the floating of one might be enough to earn Republicans a few points on the generic ballot. The Heritage Foundation suggests the White House take the drastic step of cutting expenses instead of figuring out how best to extract unending amounts of money from the American people:
It’s not a lot to ask. It’s what the working families Obama professes to be working for have to do every day with their own, personal budgets. The last quote in the VAT article is my favorite. As it becomes increasingly obvious that soaking the rich, taxing energy, sodas, cigarettes, and unhealthy foods will not pay for Democratic dreams, Democrats dream of other sources:
Perhaps Obama could appoint her to head of the Dept. of Squeezing Blood From Stones. Update: Here’s a savings idea. Our currency alone costs us $848 million a year. Go debit!
