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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (55368)	10/29/2002 2:29:23 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

1. Tax Tinkerers (Reason) The gnomes at the Treasury Department, 104 of them to be exact, have been busy. What have they cobbled together? Why, a tax reform scheme with a brand new value-added tax at its center. Rewind to 1993. When the Hillary Clinton camp let slip that a VAT might be used to pay for the great health care overhaul, Republicans reacted as if they'd been gutted. The VAT idea cemented the idea of the Clintons as malevolent wonks, bent on turning America into a Denmark with much better beaches. The Bush team is no doubt trying to tell themselves that their VAT would be different. For starters, they won't even call it a VAT, preferring something like "uniform business income tax." It'll be a rational tax to replace the irrational corporate code, they'll say. Individuals won't even know it is there. Of course, that is the problem with VATs. They are hidden from view, thus making them very easy to raise. The folks who pay them -- consumers -- often don't know that they're paying them. Further, once one VAT is in place, the concept will spread to other segments of the tax code, and Americans will find themselves paying value-added taxes on a range of goods and services. A little VAT is like a little cancer: It grows and metastasizes. But for some reason this Treasury Department is obsessed with bringing European-style "efficiency" to the tax code. In fact, a VAT is more likely to bring Euro-style revenues to Washington and Euro-style economic malaise to the rest of the county. washingtonpost.com