Time for the U.S. to Join the Value-Added Tax Bandwagon
OPS_admin | Mar 11, 2010 | Comments 0
The value-added tax allows nations to build revenue through taxation, and thus guarantees their financial stability, but it builds revenue on foreigners as well as domestic residents. In the U.S. we tax our own citizens and then ask foreign countries to loan us the difference.
The value-added tax, or VAT, is the most widespread and successful taxation scheme in use around the world today. More than 140 nations utilize the value-added tax system as a means of building government revenue.
Unfortunately, the VAT also acts as a means of unofficially blockading imported goods. The value-added tax is plugged on to every good and service inside the economy. In so doing it makes domestic alternatives more fiscally or economically responsible as consumer items.
Every time a nation joins the World Trade Organization, or signs into a new free trade agreement, it almost always replaces the now illegal “import tariffs” with a completely legal national consumption tax – almost always in the form of a VAT. The new national consumption tax acts just like a tariff, but it does so within the legal confines of the WTO and other international accords.
Full Story: Time for the U.S. to Join the Value-Added Tax Bandwagon | Economy In Crisis.
Filed Under: Economy - Labor
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If we don't change our ways soon...
A new report by the Royal Society, chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston warns that world population must be stabilized and consumption in wealthy nations must be reduced or the entire planet is in big trouble. As the report reads: "The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment. We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption... or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future."This is the same warning that President Jimmy Carter gave Americans back in the 1970's - but it was ignored when Ronald Reagan came to power with a "more positive" message basically telling Americans we can do whatever we want. And then after 9/11 - Bush told us all we should go shopping and consume ever more.And now with corporations calling the shots in Washington - long-term sustainability of the planet takes a back seat to short-term profits. If we don't change our ways soon - and embrace clean, alternative energy and educate women around the plant - then we all could be headed for a rough century.-Thom(Is there any chance we will learn in time? Tell us here.) -
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
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