Plan to tax child care, food, and medicine

Last week the California blue-ribbon panel on tax reform released its report. The general recommendation is to cut income tax on the rich and substitute a "business net receipts tax":

This would replace the corporate income tax and some sales taxes. In practical terms it resembles a sales tax expanded to cover food, medicine and services like child care and medical treatment -- which are tax-exempt today and represent a relatively larger share of expenditures by lower-income households than the wealthy.

 While this would simply be a transfer of tax burden from rich people to poor and middle-class people, if it were portrayed as a new tax, maybe the tea-partyers would demonstrate against it. More likely the people who would benefit would call the opposition to the tax change "Hitler getting between you and your sainted mom's arthritis medicine," and it would turn into an anti-Obama movement.