I can’t help but laugh at the transparent crap passed around by the protectors of the financial kingdom. In a column in today’s Wall Street Journal, Roger Altman writes under the headline, "We’ll Need To Raise Taxes Soon". Altman’s tagline for his bio reads: "founder and chairman of Evercore Partners, was deputy secretary of the Treasury in the first Clinton administration." It really doesn’t describe him fully–this is a guy who started his career at Lehman Brothers in the 1970s and, until his "selfless" service to the nation in the Clinton years, was a vice-chairman of The Blackstone Group, and "head of its merger and acquisition advisory business and a member of its investment committee", with "primary responsibility for Blackstone’s international business". If you want a profile of a guy with the hand on the tiller of the disastrous financial system that has impoverished millions, Altman is your guy.

   So, what’s the upshot of the future of tax hikes?:

Today, the U.S. ranks next to last among the 28 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations in total federal revenue as a share of GDP. Our federal revenues represent 18% of national output, down from 20% just 10 years ago. That makes the mismatch between our spending and our revenue very large, producing the huge deficits we face.

We all know the recent and bitter history of tax struggles in Washington, let alone Mr. Obama’s pledge to exempt those earning less than $250,000 from higher income taxes. This suggests that, possibly next year, Congress will seriously consider a value-added tax (VAT). A bipartisan deficit reduction commission, structured like the one on Social Security headed by Alan Greenspan in 1982, may be necessary to create sufficient support for a VAT or other new taxes.

This challenge may be the toughest one Mr. Obama faces in his first term. Fortunately, the new president is enormously gifted. That’s important, because it is no longer a matter of whether tax revenues must increase, but how.

   Altman is now the most recent stalking horse for the VAT–a regressive tax. It is fascinating to read how someone can write an entire column about the decline of tax revenues and entirely ignore the reason: a raid on the country’s treasury by people like him, the richest one person who have plundered our resources to the tune of trillions of dollars. Why does the U.S. ranks next-to-last among 28 OCED nations? Mainly because in most of those nations, it is an accepted fact that the richest one person pay a larger percentage of their income back as dues to run a decent society.

   So, we now are told: taxes are going up. We, the bankers and the other genuises who have entirely failed in managing the economy, are going to sock middle-income people with a regressive tax–but never address the real crime: how the wealthiest one percent have ripped off the country.