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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (1799)	11/19/2008 4:32:10 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Re: "how about the value added tax, so there is no income tax at all, we only pay when we buy something?" As you note... a VAT is a version of a Consumption Tax --- not the Income taxes were were previously talking about. So... if you want to talk about the relative merits of INCOME vs. CONSUMPTION taxes we could.... (My opinion is that they each have advantages and disadvantages.) But... if you are asking about the Value-Added Tax (as used in Europe, Canada, etc.) my opinion is that it is one of the WORST versions of a consumption tax possible! It takes armies of bureaucrats to administer a typical VAT (with separate percentages to levy on thousands and thousands of different 'types' of products, and at different 'levels' of production), and the taxes get levied at EACH step in the production process, so largely 'invisible' government tax bites happen without the public really being aware of how much is being taken. Very, very bad. Hard to imagine a more bureaucrat-friendly type of tax process.