Free Republic

As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh. With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable. We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks -- the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) -- is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement. It will...

WASHINGTON--With Congress and the White House mindful—and troubled— that health-care reform could cost over $1 trillion in the next decade, the House Ways and Means Committee this week compiled a list of ways to raise money based on options from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. One is that hoary old chestnut the national value-added tax (VAT), similar to a national sales tax. It is more popular with some conservatives, who see it as an alternative to taxing income, than with liberals, but a few liberals like it because they see it as a tax on consumption that will encourage saving,...

They've survived the bursting of the tech bubble, a global economic downturn and the occasional virus, but now overseas Internet retailers may see their European profit push derailed by one of the oldest drags on business: tax. On July 1, a new EU directive goes into effect requiring all Internet companies to account for value added tax, or VAT, on "digital sales."The law adds a 15 percent to 25 percent levy on select Internet transactions such as software and music downloads, monthly subscriptions to an Internet service provider and on any product purchased through an online auction anywhere in the...