For Americans gullible enough to believe that Obama will not raise taxes on the middle class, along comes the proposal for a VAT, or a Value Added Tax.

Because now we have deficits as far as the eye can see, and so Washington is abuzz not about spending cuts but about VAT which is another way of taxing people, ostensibly without their knowledge. Except that most Americans know exactly what the VAT means.

VAT is a process used in Europe (where else…?) of adding a small tax to a product at every stage of production. It works like this: Think about making a box of corn flakes. The farmer pays a small VAT tax on his fuel and fertilizer for growing his corn; then the processor pays a small VAT tax on the electricity he uses for making the corn into flakes; and then the trucking company pays a small VAT tax on the repairs for the trucks it uses to get the corn flakes to market; and then the supermarket pays a small VAT on its electric bill.

In short, each time that “value is added” to the product – by the farmer, by the processor, by the trucker, by the supermarket etc, – it is taxed. Each contribution is small, but pretty soon you are talking about real money, like hundreds of billions of dollars over the entire economy. And pretty soon, all those taxes are passed along to the consumer, and a box of corn flakes costs $5 instead of $4, and we’re not supposed to know why. And the difference between the old market price of $4 and the new price of $5 all ends up in the pocket of the government.

Of course, the silly American middle class is not supposed to know it is happening because it is hidden.

Why are Democrats proposing a VAT in the first place?

Answer: Because you don’t magically insure millions of people under ObamaCare without paying for it. Or make up the huge deficits we have from our Obama economy. So anyone who has any wealth left is going to be taxed through the VAT on top of increased taxes for everything else. If we allow it to happen, that is. Which we won’t.

And since Obama said that he was not going to raise taxes on the middle class, he wants to use the VAT and say that he just doesn’t understand why a box of corn flakes costs $5 instead of $4. And then he will appoint a Corn Flakes Czar to find out why this is happening.

Pelosi even has said that the VAT would help to level the playing field between US and foreign manufacturers who do not have the cost of health care included in their prices because the government pays for health care in many countries. Of course in Voodoo English – the languages of Pelosi – she ignores the obvious, that a tax is a tax is a tax, and that all those Euro-insured are paying in one way or three for their “free” health care, and sinking their economies with such levies.

Hey Nancy, your popularity is not 9% for nothing…

And so here is a congressperson who thinks we need to have a sneaky stealth tax in order to get more money for the government, but who wants nothing of the sort when it comes to collecting all the other federal taxes that we already pay.

What does that mean?

It means this: For decades now conservatives and other sound-minded economists have been arguing for new and simpler ways to collect our federal taxes to replace the abhorrent Internal Revenue Service and its leviathan tax code: The proposals are:

*A Flat Tax, in which a filer simply takes his annual income, multiplies it by a fixed percentage rate and sends a check to the government. In other words, rather than sweating out your 1040s and 1099s and all the rest from January 1 to April 15 and spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on an accountant and figuring out all those little boxes in the tax booklet, you just take your income (say $50,000), multiply it by the rate (say 10%) and send the government $5,000. Simple. Taxes done in two minutes. Russia has adopted a 17% flat tax and it has proven to be a huge boost to its economy, and to all the other global economies that have adopted it. Because it simplifies the system. And simplification is a good thing.

*The other option is a National Sales Tax (NST) in which every item you buy has a federal tax on it like a state sales tax. This also has been called the Fair Tax. So under NST, you pay your taxes when you buy stuff and don’t need to fill out any forms for April 15. And VAT could be just another automatic collection system like the NST.

Of course, the first impulse is to reject NST as “another tax”. But like the Flat Tax, a National Sales Tax would replace your IRS tax forms which would be a huge simplification. No more payments to lawyers and accountants, no more IRS, no more government harassment, no more all-nighters with the calculator and the instruction book.

In fact, NST is much like the VAT – it is automatic. But the Flat Tax and the NST are intended to replace the existing tax system, while the VAT that is being talked about now is another stealth tax on top of the horrendous IRS-based system we have now.

So in other words, Pelosi has no interest in relieving the American people of IRS tyranny with a Flat Tax or a National Sales Tax or even an economy-wide VAT, all of which represent simplification. Because the existing IRS system is an oppressive force that liberals use to threaten, harass and intimidate Americans. Democrats wish to maintain the current IRS system and then add to it with a VAT so that we all can pay those additional taxes without thinking about it, or filling out any forms. So we get the worst of both worlds.

Americans had better get used to the fact that Obama’s health-care plan is going to need nothing more than a huge tax increase. Yet we can fix the current health-care system by restraining the trial lawyers and the health-care unions (both Democrat) and by restraining the state bureaucrats (Democrats) from imposing all sorts of demands on insurance companies like requiring that any policy sold in, say, Connecticut must include acupuncture, mole removal, alcohol treatment and 100 other procedures that a consumer may not even want, pushing up the price.

Obama’s Value Added Tax is nothing more than another usurpation of our freedom through trickery and deceit. We already are hemorrhaging jobs because America‘s corporate taxes are the second highest in the world. With Obama and his minions working feverishly every day to tie us all up into bigger and bigger fiscal knots, we can see that they want to take us into a land where there is no exit and no logic or simplicity to boot.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.