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Your taxes aren't going up, so stop complaining and pay your higher taxes.

June 10, 2009

Back in April, lapsed conservative Bruce Bartlett said the "Tea Party" protesters were just a bunch of partisan whiners with nothing really to complain about:

... it is hard to find evidence that taxes are rising or unusually high... I believe this was largely a partisan exercise designed to improve the fortunes of the Republican Party, not an expression of genuine concern about taxes or our nation's fiscal future.

But now, in his piece touting the "Value Added Tax," he says that higher taxes are inevitable:

Obviously, the recent explosion of stimulus spending has made the fiscal problem worse. We are already seeing countries like Great Britain having trouble selling bonds and being warned of downgrades by credit-rating agencies. The U.S. is not immune from such problems, which could cause interest rates to skyrocket, at which point a large tax increase will be politically inevitable. The only question will be how taxes will be raised.

So those Tea Party Yay-hoos with nothing to worry about should just get behind a great big honking value added tax. But remember, they have no real complaints.