You have probably heard a lot lately about the “value added tax” [VAT] as a better way of raising money and solving the deficit problem. Badtux notes that the normally sane Paul Volcker has started talking it up.

As BT notes, this flies in the face of financial reality. When the economy is in the tank because of a lack of demand, you don’t tax consumption.

I put it down to Volcker being a banker and totally lacking a clue how the real world of the market works. If you don’t make enough money to pay income taxes, tax credits aren’t going to help you. If anyone thinks that shifting all of the paperwork involved in a VAT system is going to be anything but PITA for small businesses, they have never been in business.

The VAT is just another attempt by those at the top to shift the cost of government to those at the bottom.

Jobs! Create jobs and everything gets better.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

Every time you turn around, the “problem is ‘entitlements'” and the solution is cut them [and income taxes, of course]. The Boomers are always the excuse, and they are the ones who have to pay.

Ronald Reagan doubled withholding taxes, making the Boomers the first generation to pay the benefits of the generation before [the way it was before Reagan] and their own benefits. When it was done people still received pensions at their jobs, so there was no huge outcry. Then, a decade later, there wasn’t going to be enough money [despite all of the promises made], so Boomers have to wait until they’re 66 to retire [find your Normal Retirement Age]. Oh, yes, those job-related pensions disappeared into the pockets of hostile take-over specialists, and you were stuck with IRAs and 401Ks that disappear at the whim of Wall Street.

Now Obama and Peter G. Peterson are at it again. Peterson made his money as an investment banker, one of the criminal conspiracy that stole all of the solvent business pension funds and left the workers with nothing. He seems hell bent on making sure that the lower classes live and die in poverty so he doesn’t have to pay more than 15% on any income he hasn’t tax sheltered. Obama is just another politician sucking up to Wall Street.

The Fiscal Sustainability project is attempting to counter some of the misinformation being distributed by Peterson and Obama. Bankers got us into this mess, so they obviously aren’t smart enough to get us out. No one who predicted the dire consequences of what Wall Street and the large financial institutions were doing is associated with these efforts, only the those who kept parroting the line that “the general business conditions are sound”.

The US deficit is a deficit of income and corporate taxes, and should be paid from income and corporate tax revenues. Any problem with Social Security and Medicare can be solved by creating jobs, so there is more revenue, or raising the cap. Jobs should be the number one priority of the administration.