"The Cover" for a VAT tax

The VAT Commission: Desperately seeking cover for tax increases on the middle class

Excerpt:

A couple of trillion dollars in new deficit spending later, President Obama yesterday signed an executive order creating a Bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Yes, that's really what he called it. And you wonder why Americans are cynical about politics?

Having proposed peacetime records for spending as a share of the economy—more than 25% of GDP this year and next—Mr. Obama now promises to make "the tough choices necessary to solve our fiscal problems." And what might those choices be? "Everything's on the table. That's how this thing's going to work," Mr. Obama said.

By "everything," Mr. Obama means in particular tax increases. The President vowed in 2008 that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, but that's looking to be as forlorn a hope as peace in Palestine.

Mr. Obama's own recent budget proposal estimates that deficits will exceed $8.5 trillion over the next decade—even including revenues from the huge tax increases scheduled for next year and other new levies that aren't likely to pass. So the President and Democrats are desperately seeking political, and especially Republican, cover to go where the big money is by taxing the middle class. The commission is a bid for that cover.

Can Washington Meet the Demand to Cut Spending?

Excerpts:

Conservatives all my adulthood have said the American people were, on the issue of spending, the frog in the pot of water: The rising heat lulled him, and when the water came full boil, he wouldn't be able to jump out.

...

People are freshly aware and concerned about the real-world implications of a $1.6 trillion dollar deficit, of a $14 trillion debt. It will rob America of its economic power, and eventually even of its ability to defend itself. Militaries cost money. And if other countries own our debt, don't they in some new way own us? If China holds enough of your paper, does it also own some of your foreign policy? Do we want to find out? And there are the moral implications of the debt, which have so roused the tea party movement: The old vote themselves benefits that their children will have to pay for. What kind of a people do that?

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The GOP itself should be going forward with its philosophy, with the things it's long stood for and, in some cases, newly rediscovered, and painting the broader picture of the implications of endless, compulsive high spending.

Comment: What's a VAT tax? Stands for Value Added Tax. It's the European way of burying taxes into the cost of everything!