“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says ‘we’re going to have comprehensive immigration reform now.’ Top political bloggers don’t see it.” So begins the National Journal’s write-up of this week’s blogger poll. Seventy percent of the Left and 78% of the Right called enactment of a comprehensive bill either “very” or “somewhat” unlikely. I was in the “very” group: “As the passage of ObamaCare showed, the Reid-Pelosi team has extraordinary talent at pushing unpopular legislation through Congress. But it seems unlikely that there will be enough swing-seat Democrats, who are already in enough trouble, willing to change their own chances of re-election from ‘difficult’ to ‘nearly impossible.'”
The second question asked the bloggers if they were open to supporting some form of a VAT. Only 1/3 of the Left and 1/6 of the Right expressed openness. I was part of that small minority: “If and only if accompanied by substantial, immediate fiscal reform, such as a balanced budget amendment, major entitlement reform, a large reduction in the percentage of the population who are consumers rather than payers of income tax revenues, and an iron-clad program to pay down the federal debt.”