Get Ready for a National Sales Tax

European-style taxes will follow European-style health care entitlement as surely as night follows day, warns Charles Krauthammer. ObamaCare, when you remove the "budgetary gimmicks," will add trillions to the national debt, leaving the president's deficit reduction committee with no option but to call for the introduction of value-added tax, Krauthammer argues in the Washington Post.

VAT will provide an easy "river of revenue" and it would be fine as a replacement for income tax, but it will need to go on top of income tax to support President Obama's expansion of the welfare state, Krauthammer writes. Obama, he writes, has succeeded in reversing Reagan's policy of starving "the governmental beast" in order to shrink it. The beast has been expanded, and now it will need to be fed. "And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough." (More health care reform stories.)