Suitably Flip

(Yet) Another New Tax From Which the Bottom 95% Should Probably Divert Their Eyes

Shazam.

With budget deficits soaring and President Obama pushing a trillion-dollar-plus expansion of health coverage, some Washington policymakers are taking a fresh look at a money-making idea long considered politically taboo: a national sales tax.

Common around the world, including in Europe, such a tax -- called a value-added tax, or VAT -- has not been seriously considered in the United States. But advocates say few other options can generate the kind of money the nation will need to avert fiscal calamity.

At a White House conference earlier this year on the government's budget problems, a roomful of tax experts pleaded with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to consider a VAT. A recent flurry of books and papers on the subject is attracting genuine, if furtive, interest in Congress. And last month, after wrestling with the White House over the massive deficits projected under Obama's policies, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee declared that a VAT should be part of the debate.

While it'd be a whopper, a national sales tax seems unlikely (despite the pesky mathematical consequences of the government spending gazillions of dollars it doesn't have).  Republicans hate it because it's an enormous new tax.  And Democrats don't love it as lasciviously as they do other taxes because it's less "progressive" (i.e. it doesn't disproportionately soak the higher income brackets as elegantly as, say, a steeply graduated income tax or a supplemental hundred-thousandaires' tax).

Happily, there's a much simpler way to pay for Obama's newest trillion-dollar adventure: scrub it.

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(Yet) Another New Tax From Which the Bottom 95% Should Probably Divert Their Eyes

Shazam.

With budget deficits soaring and President Obama pushing a trillion-dollar-plus expansion of health coverage, some Washington policymakers are taking a fresh look at a money-making idea long considered politically taboo: a national sales tax.

Common around the world, including in Europe, such a tax -- called a value-added tax, or VAT -- has not been seriously considered in the United States. But advocates say few other options can generate the kind of money the nation will need to avert fiscal calamity.

At a White House conference earlier this year on the government's budget problems, a roomful of tax experts pleaded with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to consider a VAT. A recent flurry of books and papers on the subject is attracting genuine, if furtive, interest in Congress. And last month, after wrestling with the White House over the massive deficits projected under Obama's policies, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee declared that a VAT should be part of the debate.

While it'd be a whopper, a national sales tax seems unlikely (despite the pesky mathematical consequences of the government spending gazillions of dollars it doesn't have).  Republicans hate it because it's an enormous new tax.  And Democrats don't love it as lasciviously as they do other taxes because it's less "progressive" (i.e. it doesn't disproportionately soak the higher income brackets as elegantly as, say, a steeply graduated income tax or a supplemental hundred-thousandaires' tax).

Happily, there's a much simpler way to pay for Obama's newest trillion-dollar adventure: scrub it.