Word: vat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Specter of VAT...
...pick Fred Goldberg, the IRS chief under Bush, as their executive director. Goldberg is an advocate of shifting federal taxes away from income to consumption, as are -- in a general way -- Danforth and Kerrey. This worries Clinton economic advisers. Having been singed already this year by a VAT scheme, they don't want the President to be associated with any similar proposals -- at least not during his first term -- from a panel that he created...
Mainly (though some panels are weaker than others) the style gives the pictures an infrangible gravity, as in No. 57, The Female Worker Was Also One of the Last Groups to Leave the South, with its single figure of a laundress in a white smock, stirring a vat of fabrics -- blue, black, yellow, pink -- with her pole: a dense and well-locked composition, suggesting the permanence and resistance that form one of the underlying themes of Lawrence's great series...
Buried in this vat of feel-good glop are two piquant themes. One is a child's need to believe that invisible friends are real. Early on, when the four ghosts desert child Thomas and tell him, "Just be with your mommy and daddy," you can read the panic in his eyes; he is as bereft as Baby Jessica. The other theme is an adult's need to believe that our final worldly departure might come only after we have made peace with others and, thus, ourselves. That's worth a tear. Even a critic will cry for what might...
...VATs, common in Europe, impose tariffs at various stages of a product's creation, with the cost eventually passed on to the consumer in the price of the finished goods -- a de facto sales tax. Bill Clinton, shying away, dubbed them a "radical" revenue-raising method in February. But faced with the expected multibillion-dollar annual cost of extending medical coverage to all Americans, Health Secretary Donna Shalala and budget guru Alice Rivlin both seemed intrigued by a VAT -- apparently in addition to health care-dedicated revenues to be derived from higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco...