Word: vat
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Sitting in a stainless-steel vat of liquid nitrogen at Queen Victoria Medical Center in Melbourne, chilled to a crisp-320° F, are 200 glass tubes, each holding a microscopic embryo. Just two to eight cells in size, they are babies in waiting, life on ice, kept for possible use by participants in the hospital's in-vitro fertilization (IVF) program. Last week hospital officials were stunned to learn that two of their charges could be heirs to a million-dollar fortune. The news set armchair ethicists around the world abuzz and forced Australian policymakers to ponder...
Your roundup of proposed ways of making the federal tax structure fairer and more productive, "Tax Ideas from Flat to VAT," is incomplete. The House Ways and Means Committee has before it my progressive consumption-tax proposal (H.R. 4442). The consumption tax would drastically reduce the number of exclusions, deductions and credits that now make the Internal Revenue Code a cabala for tax lawyers and C.P.A.s. It would allow the deduction of all savings and investments, on the theory that people should be taxed on what they take out of the national economy by way of consumption...
...VAT would produce $60 billion in 1985. Says Republican Congressman Barber Conable of New York: "The VAT raises significant amounts of money and hides it in the price structure-a politician's dream." A VAT is harder to evade than the income tax, which is one reason it is used in Europe, where income tax cheating is common. The Internal Revenue Service says it lost $81.5 billion in 1981 because people concealed income...
...main objection to the VAT is that it would fall heavily on the poor, who spend most of their income on basic items like food and housing...
...solution would be to exempt such essentials from the tax. Walker suggests that low-income people could get income tax credits or rebates to counterbalance the VAT...