On Sunday, John Podesta (former Clinton COS and late head of the Obama transition team) floated a VAT:
“There’s going to have to be revenue in this budget,” said Podesta, Clinton’s former chief of staff and co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s transition team, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.
A so-called consumption tax would “create a balance” with European and Japanese economies and “could potentially have a substantial effect on competitiveness,” said Podesta. Value- added taxes in Europe and Japan encourage savings by taxing consumption.
Podesta said such a tax may be regressive, but can be balanced by exempting some products and using “the money to support low-wage workers.”
If this sounds familiar, it should. During the Memorial Day recess, Obama Administration officials refused to rule out a VAT. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) suggested that a VAT might be a good way to pay for Obamacare.
It goes without saying that a value-added tax is applied to most everything consumed by everybody. Not only does that make it highly regressive, it also is a clear violation of President Obama’s repeated promise not to raise "any form" of taxes on families making less than $250,000 per year.
ATR has run an Anti-VAT Congressional caucus since the early 1990s. It currently has 54 Congressmen and 4 Senators. We sent a letter (House, Senate) to the Hill today trying to punch up that number.
It’s coming. The Left does not have enough money to pay for everything. A VAT is too tempting for them.