George Will: Beware of the value-added tax

Barack Obama seems to love everthing from socialist Europe. Does that include a value-added tax?

George Will issues a warning about it.

When liberals advocate a value-added tax (VAT), conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it -- after the 16th Amendment is repealed.

A VAT will be rationalized as necessary to restore fiscal equilibrium. But without ending the income tax, a VAT would be just a gargantuan instrument for further subjugating Americans to government.

Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration -- which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better -- has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated. During the downturn, federal revenue plunged and spending soared. And, as will happen for two decades, every day 10,000 more baby boomers are joining the ranks of recipients of Medicare and Social Security, two programs with unfunded liabilities of nearly $107 trillion.

In the context of this concatenation of troubles, the administration's highest priority was to put an enormous new health-care entitlement on the welfare state's rickety scaffolding. Why? Because the liberals' lunge to maximize government's growth depends on quickly creating a crisis that can be called a threat to the entitlement menu and to the currency as a store of value. Then the public can be panicked into accepting the addition of a VAT to the existing menu of taxes.

Greece and Iceland have value-added taxes--and both nations (this has nothing to do with the volcano eruption) are on the verge of collapse.

Last week the Senate overwhelmingly approved a resolution by John McCain rejecting the idea of a value-added tax.

Here's another reason to appose a VAT. It's a regressive tax, it hurts the poor the most.

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