More On Obama's Middle Class Tax Plan

Remember the Obama campaign pledge that there will be no middle class tax hike? I do, and I I also knew then that it was a bunch of hooey. Well, I was right and oh yeah, The Wall Street Journal shares my thoughts about the Obama spending spree:

Few of President Obama’s 2008 campaign pledges were more definitive than his vow that anyone making less than $250,000 a year “will not see their taxes increase by a single dime” if he was elected. And he was right, very strictly speaking: It’s going to be many, many, many billions of dimes.

Asked about raising taxes on the middle class on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” White House economist Larry Summers wouldn’t repeat Mr. Obama’s pre-election promise. “It is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out no matter what,” Mr. Summers said—except, apparently, when his boss is running for office. Meanwhile, on ABC’s “This Week,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also slid around Mr. Obama’s vow and said, “We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically. And that’s going to require some very hard choices.”

These aren’t even nondenial denials. The Obama advisers are laying the groundwork for taxing the middle class while claiming the deficit made them do it.

Of course, the Obama Administration is going to blame the Bush Administration for the deficit instead of owning the deficit like they should be doing with their off the charts spending.

So waiting in the wings is the biggest middle-class tax increase of them all: a European-style value added tax, or VAT. This tax would apply to every level of production or service, and it is beloved by politicians in Europe because it raises so much money so easily without voters noticing. Ezekiel Emanuel, a White House aide and brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has advocated a 10% VAT to finance national health care. Look for a VAT to be one of the prominent options when Mr. Obama’s tax reform commission issues its report later this year.

The undeniable reality is that you can’t run a European-style welfare-entitlement state without European-style levels of taxation on the middle class (and eventually without low European-style growth and high jobless rates). It’s looking more and more like Mr. Obama’s no-middle-class-tax pledge was one of the greatest confidence tricks in American political history.

If the VAT is passed you can almost guarantee a one term for Obama and a fair number of people in Congress tossed out on their ear.

A VAT is, in some ways, like a sales tax, but it is even worse since it is not a fixed percentage, like 5 percent on goods and services at the point of sale. VAT is assessed at every step along the commerce chain and the consumer, at the end of the chain, takes the biggest hit. Who are the biggest consumers in America-yep the middle class.

Can I at least get a kiss before I get screwed?