NEXT UP, THE VAT TAX. Why not? We’ve already got fat taxes.

With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes — then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

Read James Pethokoukis’s commentary to see how the VAT could come to pass. I could live with a VAT in lieu of an income tax, but only if a massive, market-based restructuring of ObamaCare was part of the package.

SIDE NOTE: the value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax, structurally similar to the Fair Tax, but without its transparency. As Pethokoukis notes: “[P]oliticians love the hidden aspect of a VAT as way of duping voters. To them opaqueness is a feature, not a bug.”