Kudos for candor to Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman and current White House economic adviser, for admitting what other Democrats also know but don't want to admit until after the November election: The political class is preparing to pass a European-style value-added tax.
Answering a question at the New York Historical Society on Tuesday, Mr. Volcker said that a VAT—a consumption tax levied along stages of production—"was not as toxic an idea" as it has been, and that both a VAT and some kind of tax on energy need to be on the table. "If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes," he said.
We've long predicted that this would be the White House fiscal strategy, and its new deficit commission is bound to propose something along these lines. In Europe, a VAT rate that reaches 20% in some countries applies to countless products and services, so the middle class would be hit especially hard.
3 comments:
Canada had a provincial and a federal VAT. Go on up an see the wonders of taxing commerce has done for them and preview what will happen here. Better yet Hawaii the birthplace of America's Lenin, where the Excise Tax has wiped out manufacturing and reduced this state to garage industries of homemade trinkets and silk screen t-shirts. Mahalo
I looked up the word middle class in my Websters. Like history it to has disappeared.
I pledge allegiance, to the barack, of the bankrupt states of America, and to the socialist, for which he stands, one divided nation, under no God, with free healthcare and welfare for all............
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