Summers on VAT

This is apparently a few years old, but it's new to me, and it made me laugh:

There is an oft-repeated saying about the VAT made by Larry Summers back in 1988. The reason the United States doesn't have one, he said, is because conservatives view it as a money machine and liberals see it as a tax on the poor. We will have a VAT, Summers predicted, when liberals figure out that it is a money machine and conservatives see that it is a tax on the poor.

So Bruce Bartlett in The New American Economy, citing Jan M. Rosen in the New York Times, Dec. 19, 1988.