VAT's Enough

Bruce Bartlett at the New York Times has a very interesting article concerning our enormous deficit and how we might combat it. (user/pass=syntaxbad/optimate - The article requires the NY Times lame "Times Select" access, so I am temporarily providing my account info for your use - I will be changing my password again in a few days, for security reasons, so read/save the article while you have the chance) Surprisingly (considering his conservative demeanor) he suggests increased taxes as the solution to our budget woes.
His argument, in brief, is that all of the traditional target areas of spending cuts, viz. the military spending, Medicare, social security, pork, etc are either too small to make a difference, or extremely impractical to cut. As he sees it "every major deficit reduction effort of the last 25 years has relied mainly on higher revenues", be they from a booming economy or actual tax increases. By his reasoning, we need an increase in revenues of 10% of GDP per year over the next generation in order to keep the deficit from getting out of control.
According to the CBO, letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire in 2010 would only get us a little over 1% of GDP worth of increased revenues. We would have to nearly double both the corporate and income tax rates to attain the levels of revenue he claims we require. Clearly this is impossible and so Bartlett suggests the introduction of a Value Added Tax (VAT). VATs (also known as Consumption Taxes) are found in most of the rest of the industrialized world ranging from 5% in Japan to 25% in Sweden, although, to my knowledge, we have never had one here. As Bartlett puts it:
"The V.A.T. is a kind of sales tax embedded in the price of goods. A farmer who grows wheat, for example, pays, say, 10 percent on the sale. The miller buys the wheat (with the tax indicated on the invoice), makes flour, and when that is sold, he also pays 10 percent, but gets a credit for the taxes the farmer paid. The baker who makes bread from the flour also pays 10 percent when he sells to the food store, but gets credit for the taxes paid by the farmer and the miller. Since taxes must be paid in order to claim credits for the taxes embedded in the bread at earlier stages of production, the tax is largely self-enforcing."
Bartlett recokons that a 10% VAT in the US would net us about $500 billion a year, which should be sufficient to deal with the spiraling budget deficit in the coming years. The idea has some appeal to me, but obviously one must buy the argument that reductions in spending are only likely to go so far. What do you all think?