Some on the left are already starting to talk about bringing to America one of the worst aspects of European tax policy:
Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — John Podesta compared the nation’s current budget crisis to the situation former President Bill Clinton faced in 1993 and said some form of a value-added tax is “more plausible today than it ever has been.”
“There’s going to have to be revenue in this budget,” said Podesta, Clinton’s former chief of staff and co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s transition team, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.
A so-called consumption tax would “create a balance” with European and Japanese economies and “could potentially have a substantial effect on competitiveness,” said Podesta. Value- added taxes in Europe and Japan encourage savings by taxing consumption.
Podesta said such a tax may be regressive, but can be balanced by exempting some products and using “the money to support low-wage workers.”
Except, of course, that we’re not talking about getting rid of the income tax and imposing a pure consumption tax, which is something that might be worth considering. Instead, this would be an additional tax on top of everything else that’s paid, and it would hit low-income workers the worst.
So much for no middle class tax hike.
H/T: Vodkapundit
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Would someone let me know when these folks are done extracting and destroying value, so we can start creating it again in the name of our and our childrens’ futures?
A VAT tax is a bad idea under our current system. The problem I have with consumption taxes is that they are generally bottom loaded taxes, in other words the poor generally end up paying the greater share of the tax burden that way.