“I think there are many good arguments that you can make for a value added tax or a consumption tax, as opposed to a tax on wages” said National Commission on Fiscal Reform Co-Chairman Erskine Bowles on April 25 during a joint appearance with Co-Chair Alan Simpson on Fox News. This is a chilling statement both for what it says about tax burdens and what it says about tax reform. One of the most poorly kept secrets in Washington is that the President’s so-called debt commission is supposed to find …
President Obama has consistently ducked the question on whether he is considering a massive tax hike in the form of a value added tax (VAT) – until now. Yesterday in an interview with CNBC, the president made clear that he is open to a VAT – once he has seen the recommendations his Debt Commission makes. The president’s comments spell out what has been obvious for months: the debt commission is a stalking horse for the VAT as the solution to close massive deficits today and in the future. A …
Earlier this year, after Congress passed an increase in the debt ceiling, was deliberating over a trillion plus health care package, and the President’s Budget promised new record deficits, the American people started to see a worrisome trend that pushed fiscal responsibility to the forefront of the public’s priorities. President Obama responded by creating the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan commission tasked with submitting a solution to the nation’s fiscal woes by the end of the year. Problem solved, right?
Suddenly, the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders seem to want health-care news stories to fall off of the front page. This week, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman abruptly cancelled a high-profile hearing he had called just days earlier to berate corporate CEOs who dared to tell their investors that the health-care bill would raise their costs. It seems to have dawned on Congressman Waxman and his staff that his transparent effort to intimidate anyone who tells the truth about the legislation could actually backfire on him and …
The United States is on an unsustainable financial course, and everyone seems to know it. As Heritage highlighted in our recently published 2010 Budget Chart Book, if nothing is done, federal obligations will reach heights that even enormous tax increases will be unable to reverse. In 2010, the federal budget deficit will be 11 percent of GDP, and the federal debt is on course to continue to skyrocket. Interest payments on the debt in one month alone in 2009 exceeded yearly expenditures on several federal departments, including the Department of …
President Obama’s push to enact a massive tax increase in the form of a new value-added tax (VAT) is now clearly underway. Earlier this week, Obama economic adviser and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker said a “VAT should be on the table.” White House claims that Volcker was speaking as a private citizen simply do not pass the laugh test. A senior statesman among economists, Volcker is one of the president’s closest economic advisers. No doubt Volcker let the cat out of the bag prematurely from the …
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), over half of President Barack Obama’s new $940 billion health care entitlement is paid for by price-fixing Medicare cuts. Never mind that the President’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says that these cuts would cause “roughly 20 percent” of Medicare providers to go bankrupt in Obamacare’s first ten years. The CBO has to believe these cuts will happen because they are required, by law, to believe everything Congress tells them. The American people are not. So the American people ought to …
P.J. O’Rourke once quipped about spending in Washington: “The budget grows because, like zygotes and suburban lawns, it was designed to do nothing else.” To help pay for their addiction to more spending, the left is now calling for a value-added tax or VAT. Cato Senior Fellow Dan Mitchell, in conjunction with the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation, has produced a video conclusively showing that the VAT will do nothing to stop deficits since governments that have adopted VATs have a proven track record of only raising spending even …
The Washington Post today ran an article on the possibility of lawmakers enacting a value-added tax (VAT) to pay for soaring government spending. A VAT is basically a national sales tax, and the possible 25 percent tax rate floated in the article would raise the cost of virtually all goods and services by 25 percent. It would devastate families and businesses, kill jobs, and hammer the economy. VAT proponents take continued runaway spending for granted, leaving only the issue of how to extract the necessary tax dollars from working Americans. …
Massive increases of spending by the Obama Administration, from the stimulus to its proposed budget, have created historically unprecedented large deficits that will push the nation’s debt level to unsustainable levels. It was only a matter of time before the proponents of big government began their push to substantially increase the amount of revenue raised by the federal government to close these budget gaps and pay for other big-government priorities like nationalized healthcare. The tax hike proposals offered so far—such as taxes on sugary drinks or tax hikes on alcoholic …
