VAT follow-up

At yesterday's ABA-Tax Analysts Tax Reform Panel, someone from the audience made the suggestion that, if Congress actually enacted a VAT, whether straightforwardly or via a disguise such as the DBCFT, it surely wouldn't be a pure-looking broad-based one. Rather, there would presumably be lots of special rules for particular industries, etc.

I actually once wrote and published a commissioned article about this very topic, for a conference on tax reform.  The piece is more than 10 years old, so the political discussion might be a tad out of date, but the more general points may still hold. It's available here.