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 not fully clear what president-elect Obama plans to do on tax policy other than “redistribute” and make those families making over $250,000 pay their “fair share.” But I was intrigued by his platform pledge to:

Dramatically simplify taxes by consolidating existing tax credits…enabling as many as 40 million middle-class Americans to do their own taxes in less than five minutes without an accountant.

I don’t think for a minute that real tax simplification and genuine transparency (to make protest and revolt…

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