James Pethokoukis is surely on to something when, over at his Reuters blog, he exposes President Obama’s election-year promise not to raise taxes on middle-class Americans as a sham:

Obama’s campaign promise to not raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 a year was always considered a joke here inside the Beltway. It’s the economic “consensus” — and this was true even before the financial meltdown and recession — that rising entitlement costs would eventually mean a higher tax burden for the American people.
Maybe it was a joke inside the campaign, too. Since being elected, Obama has raised cigarette taxes and has advocated raising healthcare taxes, energy and small business taxes, in addition to corporate taxes. What’s more, economic advisers like Larry Summers seem eager to get rid of all the Bush tax cuts, not just those on so-called wealthy Americans.

Pethokoukis describes the administration’s recent trial balloons on the subject of a value-added tax, floated via John Podesta and other official and unofficial reps, and foresees a VAT push embedded in a larger package of fiscal measures.

I think that Obama’s tax pledge, by the way, did not determine the 2008 outcome (which became inevitable after the financial meltdown) but almost certainly attracted enough tax-wary independents to pad his winning margin and perhaps flip a couple of the close states. Will he and the Democrats in Congress risk a political backlash by trying to pass another big tax hike during some future session? In a word, yes. It’s an inescapable element of their broader political program, and they believe it’s the right thing to do. As with health care, they believe that whatever short-run political costs they must bear, they’ll be seen as heroes in the long run by moving America closer to the European-style welfare state they consider the necessary outcome of social progress.