{"id":548116,"date":"2010-04-30T14:20:24","date_gmt":"2010-04-30T18:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/business\/archive\/2010\/04\/the-fierce-urgency-of-vat\/39753\/"},"modified":"2010-04-30T14:20:24","modified_gmt":"2010-04-30T18:20:24","slug":"the-fierce-urgency-of-vat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/548116","title":{"rendered":"The Fierce Urgency of VAT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Within the debate about the deficit, there is another debate about timing. If public debt does trigger a financial crisis, it won’t be tomorrow. It won’t be next year. It probably won’t be in five years. So what is everybody doing running around screaming about the fierce urgency of VAT?<\/p>\n

Here’s Bruce Bartlett’s answer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

What I expect is that when there is the inevitable flare-up in
\nfinancial markets as bond prices crash, the dollar takes an unexpected
\ndip, the price of oil shoots up or whatever that Congress and the White
\nHouse will solemnly vow to cut the deficit because it will be the one
\nthing that everyone will be able to agree upon that might help and at
\nleast won’t hurt. Everyone will go out to Andrews Air Force Base and
\nafter weeks of intense negotiations announce that a deal has been
\nstruck to deal with the crisis. <\/p>\n

Republicans will inevitably agree
\nto some modest tax increases, Democrats will agree to trim Medicare and
\nMedicaid, and both sides will promise that discretionary spending will
\nbe slashed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A VAT could take a decade to set up and index until you’re locked in at a long-term rate of 8 or 10 percent. But America’s not very good at dealing with slow-moving crises, even with slow-moving solutions. We’re much better at waiting until a crisis happens, acting quickly, and then putting together commissions to find out why nobody saw it coming.<\/p>\n



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Within the debate about the deficit, there is another debate about timing. If public debt does trigger a financial crisis, it won’t be tomorrow. It won’t be next year. It probably won’t be in five years. So what is everybody doing running around screaming about the fierce urgency of VAT? Here’s Bruce Bartlett’s answer: What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-548116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}