{"id":17751,"date":"2010-04-05T07:34:05","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T13:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=17751"},"modified":"2010-04-05T07:34:05","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T13:34:05","slug":"the-united-states-of-western-western-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=17751","title":{"rendered":"The United States of Westernist Western Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Hudson Institute’s Irwin Stelzer, writing<\/a> in the WSJ:<\/p>\n

So we are to have a European-style value-added tax (VAT). That’s the emerging consensus in Washington as people come to recognize the reality of the deep financial hole into which the Obama administration has dug us.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The tax sounds simple, but don’t be fooled. Because both upper- and lower-income families pay the tax at an equal rate, the VAT is considered regressive; that is, it hits the poor harder than the better-off. So it is the practice in countries such as Britain to exempt food, which lower-income families spend a greater proportion of their income on. The technical term is “zero rating,” meaning that exempt items are taxed at a “zero rate.”<\/p>\n

However, wait until the folks at the IRS get their hands on the regulations for the application of the new tax. […].<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This process of writing regulations for the VAT man when he cometh is more than merely amusing. For one thing, it confers enormous power on faceless bureaucrats.<\/p>\n

They can hand a competing product the advantage in the U.K. of a price 17.5% lower (in Sweden it’s 25%) than a close substitute. That invites both lobbying and corruption and sheer, inexplicable arbitrariness. Get your “sweetened dried fruit” deemed to be “held out for sale as snacking and home baking” and your product will bear a tax and have to compete on grocers’ shelves with zero-rated “sweetened dried fruit held out for sale as confectionary\/snacking.” Peddle your sandwiches “as a general grocery item” and consumers pay no tax, but offer them as “part of a buffet service” and the VAT man wants his 17.5%.<\/p>\n

Manufacturers twist and turn and juggle their product specifications and processes, not to find the most efficient way of making things but the surest way of obtaining a zero rating. The resulting inefficiencies cannot be measured accurately, but they certainly contribute to Europe’s lagging productivity and increasing inability to compete in world markets.<\/p>\n

For a long time conservatives favored some sort of VAT, on the theory that it is better to tax consumption than jobs. But that support was based on the theory that taxes on incomes would be reduced to offset the increase from VAT.<\/p>\n

That is not to be, given the preferences of the Obama team and the state of the nation’s finances. But what is to be is the reason liberals love VAT: It is easy to raise the rate, a bit at a time, unnoticed by the voters\u2014just as a frog put into a pot of boiling water will immediately try to jump out, but placed in cold water that is only gradually heated it may not notice until it’s too late.<\/p>\n

So there is a VAT in our future, and like other taxes, it will have unfortunate consequences. Since there is world-wide experience with this tax, none of those consequences can be deemed “unintended”\u2014they are already out there for all to see.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pretty soon, some wag is going to get the itch to ask why we bothered fighting the Revolutionary War in the first place. <\/p>\n

At which point some other wag will quip, “Because we fancy our<\/em> king have a tan.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hudson Institute’s Irwin Stelzer, writing in the WSJ: So we are to have a European-style value-added tax (VAT). That’s the emerging consensus in Washington as people come to recognize the reality of the deep financial hole into which the Obama administration has dug us. […] The tax sounds simple, but don’t be fooled. Because both upper- and lower-income families pay the tax at an equal rate, the VAT is<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":9196393,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9196393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}