"VAT Is French for Big Government" - Grover Norquist Offers Proven Spending Cuts

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 6:27 PM

Today, the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform convened again to discuss the growing federal deficit. As we have explained before, any commission serious about addressing the nation's insolvency should be focused on the government's unsustainable spending, not the mounting debt. A fixation on the deficit clouds the lack of political will to cut spending and ultimately leads to higher taxes to plug the hole dug by exploding federal outlays.

Today's meeting proved this point - the hearing was dominated by discussion of a European-style Valued-Added Tax (or VAT), about which ATR has been warning taxpayers for years. The VAT is a favorable mode of taxation for lawmakers because it is entirely opaque - unlike the sales tax in the United States, which taxpayers can see calculated in the final price of a good, a VAT is applied to every step of production and is inherent in the price of a good. This makes a VAT easy to inflate and almost impossible to repeal.

ATR President Grover Norquist testified in front of the Commission at the end of June, and offered not one but fourteen separate alternatives to raising taxes that would restore fiscal sanity to the federal budget. In the face of viable spending reform lawmakers, and the Commission, have no excuse to be considering tax hikes that will sink the burgeoning economy. Below are Norquist's suggestions - which do you think is the best?

Ideas to Reduce Spending

1. Resurrect the “Byrd Committee.”
2. Give the public five days to read bills before a floor vote. 
3. Put every federal transaction and contract online in real time.
4. Term limit appropriators. 
5. Sitting Congressmen and Senators should not be able to name buildings or other monuments to themselves, and none should be named for them while they are still living.
6. Block grant education funding and welfare to the states.
7. Freeze the salary and benefit levels of federal employees.
8. Require all eligible federal employees to compete for their job with a private sector bidder.
9. Only hire one new federal employee for every two that retire from government employment.
10. Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act.
11. Reform farm subsidies along the lines of the 1996 “Freedom to Farm” Act.
12. Leave defense cuts on the table.
13. Stop using “emergency” spending loopholes to get around budget rules.
14. Freeze discretionary spending at 2007 levels.

Click here to read Norquist's testimony in its entirety.

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