A national sales tax? Start the debate now

So I was speaking the other day to the retirees' class. We always have a good discussion.

These people are well-informed. If I get in a hurry and skip over some integral element of a public policy issue, hands will go up to remind me of a factor I've forgotten.

If I get into something legal, there are retired lawyers, even a retired state Supreme Court chief justice, in the audience. If I get into something financial, there are retired investment bankers out there. If I get into something educational, there are plenty of retired educators.

What I was saying the other day was that the only thing I don't like about our new health care reform law, which is perfectly centrist and sensible generally, is that it's not paid for and is going to break us.

That is to say I don't believe that either we or our politicians possess the will or wherewithal to impose, over a decade, these professed half-billion dollars in reductions in Medicare spending that the Congressional Budget Office plugged into projections as instructed by the politicians.

Just look at how we already have incremental annual reductions in Medicare payments to doctors written into law and how Congress, each year, waives them with the temporary "doctor fix."

I told these couple of hundred Medicare recipients that I doubted they'd like it when their doctors started whining to them that the government was making Medicare such a bad deal for them that they might not be able to spend as much time with them or even see them at all.

I paused for disagreement. None was forthcoming. Nodding -- there was some of that.

What I was getting to was this: Our deficit appears ready to stay frightfully high, even grow, for the next several years. What is it, then, that regular people do when they can't pay their bills?

They cut whatever expenses they can and take second jobs to bring more money into the household.

They attack a deficit two ways, that is, from both the income and the outgo.

So it must be with our federal government within the next decade. It will have to demonstrate whatever actual spending reductions we can reasonably afford in the government services on which we depend. Then we will have to talk taxes, which I predicted to be in the form of a national value-added tax, which is a consumption tax somewhat akin to a national sales tax.

It's not the politicians' fault. It's all our fault. So we'll all have to pay. It's called sacrifice. It would pale against the sacrifice some of the Americans who came before us made. (Anybody watching "The Pacific" on HBO?)

A fellow spoke up. He said only Democrats would be willing to propose a value-added tax and that they'd pay a dire political price and accomplish nothing.

But there are two things about that.

One is that a few conservative commentators have started talking about it already. They see handwriting on the wall and they far prefer new taxes on consumption to higher taxes on income and wealth.

The other is that American political decision-making is based almost entirely on fear. We vote in presidential elections for the candidate who scares us least.

Just wait for a few years of economists' warnings that our debt and deficit have risen to such dangerous levels in proportion to our Gross Domestic Product that we are on a clear path to becoming wards of our creditor nations. Then you'll see public opinion begin to move.

We are now in the process of setting up a bipartisan commission to recommend ways to get the deficit down. If nothing else, this will provide a good place to introduce the discussion toward the inevitable.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.