Posted on 05/04/2012 4:20:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
I’ve written before how “The Value-Added Tax Would Be a Money Machine for Big Government.”
Writing for Bloomberg, Josh Barro has a piece entitled, “Value-Added Tax Would Raise Tons for U.S. Coffers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.townhall.com ...
Not now. Not ever!
Just look at manufacturing. Factories effectively pay a value added tax and its been killing them for decades. (Not to mention encouraging widespread cheating)
No more hidden taxes.
Josh Barro is the man who got John Derbyshire drummed out of National Review. It’s too bad his columns aren’t carried by an ink and paper publication - they’d at least be useful for lining bird cages.
Barro went full retard on the Zimmerman case and routinely pulls the race card. He also writes for the National Review.
I know that I won’t make a friends here, but if this country DEMANDS that the government spend $4T per year (through our elected reps, including the Republican House), then we SHOULD PAY FOR IT...not dump it as debt to my kids and (future) grand kids. The VAT would go a long way in that direction, and it would make EVERYONE have to pay, not just the upper middle class and above, as it is now.
“What really worries me about a VAT is that it will enable politicians to increase the burden of government spending.”
Nope, not true anymore. We passed that point in late 2008 with TARP. We’re now on autopilot - whatever the government spends is TOTALLY DECOUPLED from revenues. So we might as well try to increase revenues as much as possible, so dollar doesn’t crash and throw us into a depression worse than the 1930s. And yes, any tax on the lower and middle classes WILL increase revenue - it’s the taxes on “the rich” that do not (as they get around them).
All done, have at me...
We already have a VAT, it is called the “corporate income tax,” and it is the highest in the world, which is another reason that jobs are moving elsewhere.
You make a pretty good case for a VAT, except that same “chosen” populations would be exempted from the VAT just as they are now from the FIT, probably via yearly rebate. It would become, essentially, yet another tax on production because only people who produce something (goods, services) would be paying it. And this new tax would be, as all VATs are, completely opaque; one would never know how much tax (on top of tax on top of tax) he’s actually paying, which is inherently undesirable from a taxpayer standpoint (but which has great allure from the VAT proponents perspective, granted.)
They’d just pi** it away like the money we give them now.
Oh yeah, the VAT has worked wonders for all the Euros that have it. Right?
1) The author is absolutely correct,
and
2) When the VAT becomes law it will have been signed into law by Mitt Romney.
The VAT will simply be paid entirely by consumers who will see the price of everything skyrocket. I got a very good lesson about VAT from my son’s college roommate who was from Sweden. The first thing he bought was a compact CD player at Wal Mart for about $100. He explained that this same CD player in Sweden would retail for about $300 because of the VAT. Think of VAT as a King Kong sized sales tax.
If they are going to eliminate the income tax we can talk about it.
If they want to add it on top then no.
it’s just another pocket to pick, another government revenue stream, another way for you to have less of what you earned, adn the government to deficit spend even more.
Thanks Kaslin.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-02/value-added-tax-would-raise-tons-for-u-s-coffers.html
http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/a-vat-would-finance-the-road-to-serfdom/
http://www.cato.org/people/pub_list.php?auth_id=314&pub_list=3
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