Over at Investor’s Business Daily, Wayne Crews and I make the case against a Value Added Tax. Policy makers have been flirting with the idea as a way to reduce the $1,400,000,000,000 budget deficit.

We argue that a VAT is:

-Complex; it would require roughly doubling the size of the IRS.

-Untransparent; most VATs don’t show up on receipts the way sales taxes do. Taxpayers are clueless as to how much tax they actually pay.

-Vulnerable to special-interest tinkering; politically incorrect goods are routinely…

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It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.

The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits…

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In the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson explains in the “Public Plan Mirage” how the so-called “public option” contained in congressional health-care reform bills is just a gimmick: “It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn’t.” Steve Chapman wrote earlier about the “‘Public Option’ Health Care Scam.”

In other news, a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that the provisions in the Senate health care “reform” bill sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) would add $1,700 a year…

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Democrats are cheering a Congressional Budget Office decision to “score” the Senate Finance Committee’s version of ObamaCare as not increasing the federal budget deficit. But it pays for some of ObamaCare’s massive cost by expanding state Medicaid programs, shifting its cost to the states. That will radically increase state budget deficits. Moreover, this version of ObamaCare, while cheaper than the four other versions, still relies on mythical cost savings and massive cuts to Medicare that are likely to be canceled…

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Those pushing the Senate health care bill were ecstatic when the Congressional Budget Office reported that the bill “would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion over the 2010-2019 period.” But it’s more budgetary legerdemain, as Cato’s Michael Tanner pointed out today.  Tanner notes that new health care taxes are the revenue-raising tools:

The bill imposes a 40 percent excise tax on health-insurance plans that offer benefits in excess of $8,000 for an individual plan and $21,000 for…

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The federal budget deficit has already risen by $880 billion to an unprecedented $1.3 trillion. Most of the increase is attributable to recent increases in federal spending, including Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in “the long run,” and which ended welfare reform, destroyed thousands of jobs in the export sector, and substituted welfare for productive investments.

Ironically, Obama had campaigned on a promise, since broken, to make a “net spending cut” in…

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