This book by Alan Viard and Robert Carroll proposes to completely replace the income tax system with a progressive consumption tax.

If a value added tax is adopted, the revenue should be used to eliminate the corporate income tax and the Medicare portion of the payroll and self-employment taxes.

This article is the first part of a two-part examination of the contentious issue of how state governments' provision of goods and services to the public should be taxed under a VAT.

Current examples in Virginia and New Jersey suggest that voters may support spending cuts instead of tax increases through a value added tax.

What would happen if the United States were to adoptthe Value Added Tax (VAT)?

Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at AEI, reviews the budget outlook, the need for tax reform and the benefits of moving to a progressive consumption tax. He also discusses his forthcoming book, Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X Tax Revisited, which he coauthored with Robert Carroll of Ernst & Young. The book will be published by AEI Press in the Spring.

The value-added tax is an old idea in tax policy that, despite periodic consideration, has not been adopted in the United States.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow and Andrew Rugg is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. The views expressed in this article are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect those of any other person or institution.

In this article, Bowman and Rugg discuss the public's opinion about...