IN OTHER WORDS, THE VAT WAS DEFEATED BY THE POLITICAL PROCESS. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?

​It seems that many more enlightened countries have a national consumption tax.  Such taxes are also known as value added taxes or “VAT” and are more colloquially described as national sales taxes.  
In a discussion about why there is no national consumption tax in the United States, I learned something I hadn’t heard about before.  According to the scholar who researched the question, in the 1970s and 1980s, American lawmakers supported such taxes, but those lawmakers either abandoned the idea or were ”ousted from political office.”  That wording suggests that those lawmakers’ support of a national consumption tax resulted in electoral defeat for those lawmakers.  That shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, should it?