That is a great insight! Let's get rid of the personal income tax, and increase the corporate income tax to make it revenue neutral.
In otherwords, a VAT, so the voter doesn't have any measure of how much he pays in taxes, and saddle the corporations with even heavier burdens of tax compliance costs. Sounds like a great idea NOT.
You are being anticpated by the way, that is the ultimate direction the movement to WTO and European Union compatability is going, along with the encouragement of the so called Flat Tax with large personal exemptions(Under the Armey "flat" tax, HR1040 introduced 3/15/2001). Just a slight change at the corporate level in how capital equipement is expensed and we have you full fledged VAT with all the complexities of the current corporate tax law to play with already built in.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/foundationmessage03-00.html
"Under the WTO definition of the term, a sales tax is an indirect tax, as is an European-style VAT. The economic equivalence of an European-style VAT and a subtraction-method VAT is well-established. A subtraction-method VAT is essentially identical to a business income tax except that all purchases of plant and equipment may be expensed, rather than depreciated as under current U.S. law."
And every man woman and child in the nation, ends up paying federal taxes through that VAT with no idea whatever of the burden placed on them by ever growing government. Just take a look at what is happening with the EU & it's VATs. Just think we to can have an economy just like France.
Isn't a VAT close to a NRST? Do you think people are that stupid? So what if a VAT is buried in the price. People can still count, No?