GOP calls O's tax toxic VAT of acid

Republicans yesterday accused President Obama of plotting to slap a hefty new European-style "value added tax" on Americans after one of his top advisers raised the idea.

"To make up for the largest levels of spending and deficits in modern history, the administration is laying the foundation for a large, misguided new tax, a first-time American VAT," fumed Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the top GOPer on the Senate Finance Committee.

"If the president wants to add completely new layers of taxation, then he should take this issue before the American people when he runs for re-election."

Paul Volcker, head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, started a furor in New York Tuesday when he said the VAT "was not as toxic an idea" as it had been in the past as a way to rein in deficits.

"If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes," he said at the New-York Historical Society.

A VAT is a percentage tax on the value added to goods and services levied at each phase of production. Manufacturers pay tax on the amount of goods they produce, minus the taxes they themselves paid on the products used in production. It is different from a typical sales tax, where a consumer pays a percentage tax at the end of a supply chain.

There would be only one reason to adopt the VAT - in that ALL individual and corporate INCOME taxes be eliminated altogether.

But the plan is to adopt the VAT IN ADDITION to the proposal to raise rates to the cruelest level of “progressive” income taxes since the Second World War.

And on top of the VAT, there is also a plan to adopt a “carbon tax” related to how much carbon dioxide from the burning of “fossil” fuels is produced in the extraction, refining, transportation and retailing of a particular product. It may also be in the form of a “BTU tax”, relating to how many uits of energy were used in all stages of manufacture and distribution of goods and services.

The power to tax is the power to destroy. And taxation without representation has long been considered as reprehensible to free people everywhere.

Representation without taxation, in an effort to “equalize” things, is even more mischievious. Those upon whom the burden of taxes falls most lightly, can demand ever greater services, with little cost to themselves. But that approach is totally destructive of innovation and expansion, and soon becomes an exercise in tax avoidance by those called upon to bear the load disproportionately.

TANSTAAFL - “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”.

So someone may get something for nothing, somebody else, somewhere, has to be getting nothing for something.

It's rather comical that they ALWAYS justify a new tax under the guise of “Deficit Reduction”.

Then, after the money starts rolling into the treasury, CONgress blows it like a Meth Addict with a wheel barrow full of cash at Vegas.

It will only serve to increase the deficit much, much further.

Politicians make political noise. VATs haven’t worked in other defaulting countries and won’t work here. Consumers will only tighten up much more and become more self-sufficient. Before long, leaders of foreign fascist regimes will be triumphantly showing pictures of impoverished Americans in propaganda to their own peasants.

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