BannedCR500Riders.com

...wait until you read about the next great European import - Value-Added Tax. This is being mooted as the vehicle to raise the money to pay for the healthcare takeover. Get ready for 17.5% sales tax on everything but kids clothes and food.

Governments are always looking for new and more aggresive ways to SHAFT the tax payer, this will only get worse in the future.

The more people there are the more they are going to SHAFT us to cover the cost of all the bullshit, that people expect them to deliver.

More people will expect even more than what they do now.

I don't agree with it, but far to many people want to much for doing nothing.

redrocket190 wrote:...wait until you read about the next great European import - Value-Added Tax. This is being mooted as the vehicle to raise the money to pay for the healthcare takeover. Get ready for 17.5% sales tax on everything but kids clothes and food.

Good ol' Nancy Pelosi

She is a Frickin bitch with a capitol C

C

You


Next


Tuesday

Where are you going until then, Bob ?

Some things are just lost in translation

Sorry I was reading from left to right NOT from top to bottom.

Well it makes more sense now.

A VAT might have some theoretically attractive features, but it is a perniciously effective way of raising revenues and inevitably leads to bigger government. The best evidence comes from Europe.

Back in the mid-1960s, the burden of government in Europe wasn’t that much higher than it was in the United States. Tax revenues consumed about 30 percent of gross domestic product in Europe. The U.S. had a small advantage: The tax burden, including state and local governments, was about 27 percent of GDP. But then European governments started adopting the VAT. Denmark was the first to do so in 1967. France and Germany followed, with many other European nations imposing the tax within 5 years.

For politicians, the VAT was great news. Besides being a new source of revenue, the VAT has been a disturbingly easy tax to increase since it’s built into the price of products and hidden from consumers. Moreover, even small increases generate a big pile of revenue because the tax base is so broad. The tax has become so easy to raise that VAT rates in Europe average more than 20 percent.

For taxpayers, however, the news has been disastrous. Thanks to this levy, the burden of government in Europe today is much higher than it is in the U.S. On average, taxes consume about 41 percent of Europe’s economic output. While other taxes have also climbed, the VAT certainly has helped finance the explosion of social welfare spending that creates such a drag on European economies. In the U.S., by contrast, the total tax burden as a share of GDP is about where it was 40 years ago — 27 percent…

Many European governments…claimed that more destructive taxes would be reduced or repealed once the VAT was implemented. In the short term, this was true: As late as 1975, taxes on income and profits were lower in the EU than they were in the U.S. But this was a transitory phenomenon. Income-tax rates quickly began climbing and almost immediately jumped above U.S. levels. Ironically, the VAT facilitated higher tax rates on income since politicians often argued that a higher VAT had to be accompanied by higher income-tax burdens to ensure the tax burden wasn’t being shifted to lower-income taxpayers.

There is only one scenario that would make a VAT acceptable. If U.S. lawmakers were willing to repeal the 16th Amendment and abolish all taxes on income, a VAT would be an acceptable risk. But until that happens, taxpayers should vigorously resist the Europeanization of America.

....from the Cato Institute.

We don't have a VAT here in Australia but we have a GST ( good and services tax )when they spoke about it being brought in we were told cheaper gasoline, stamp duty ( another tax ) will be abolished and all sales taxes will be removed and replaced by the GST.

What happened, gasoline didn't change in price, stamp duty stayed ( found out after the election stamp duty will stay for the first five years and then be removed ) now 9 years later we still have our stamp duty, put simply WE GOT SCREWED BIG TIME!

Anytime you have a tax that is a % of the price it is going to cost you, everytime the price goes up the tax goes up with, as if we don't already pay to much tax.