Read my lips: I will raise your taxes. Period.

The safest line of attack for any politician is to campaign against taxes. This rings all the right chimes: for liberals, it sounds like a defence of workers' paycheques; for conservatives, it resonates as a call for limited government.

So the opposition parties are nosing eagerly for signs of life in the issue of the government's proposed national sales tax. Liberal Leader John Turner, in his usual restrained fashion, calls it ''the most massive tax grab in history,'' and vows he would repeal it.

The alert has rippled round the ring of interest groups seeking exemptions from the tax, which had for some time lain dormant. The real estate lobby has renewed its claim that applying the tax to new housing in the same way as to every other good and service (except food and drugs) would be ''unfair.'' We can expect the clothing and footwear industries to follow.

And dear old Don Blenkarn hasn't helped, musing in the HD:s that, although Finance calculates the tax would just neatly offset cuts in income tax rates and more generous low-income tax credits, it may well raise another $10 billion on top of that, some of which - Oh Infamy!  - might be applied to the deficit.

Turner's interventions have been most choleric. It is, he says, ''a tax on everything that moves, a tax on virtually everything that you buy.'' Well, yes. That's the point. It's a comprehensive tax. To work efficiently, not to say equitably, it has to hit everything. That's the trouble with the old tax we pay now. It doesn't.

TOUCHING CONCERN

Expressions of concern from politicians for the consumer's welfare are touching, not to say startling, in view of their habit of toadying to every industry demanding such conspiracies in restraint of trade as marketing boards and import quotas. These drive up prices to those same consumers of the very ''necessities'' we are now urged, in the name of human decency, to exempt from the sales tax.

Given, moreover, that Turner's spending promises, at my estimate, have now passed the $20-billion mark, he has three courses open to him: increase the deficit, cut spending in other areas, or raise taxes (or some combination). He cannot pretend he would do none of these.

Let us say for peace of mind's sake that he would not increase the deficit. We need not add that proposals for slashing spending have not been a prominent feature of the Liberal campaign. Now: what does that leave?

In other words, any politician wishing to run about biting tax collectors on the leg must first get a license, stating clearly that he has had his anti-deficit shots. You have to earn the right to pose as the taxpayer's friend, by first making serious proposals to cut spending.

No party leader suggests anything of the kind. Therefore: more taxes, please. Do not whine that the ''middle class is getting soaked again.'' We all know where the revenues are. Nor make nice distinctions between ''income'' taxes and ''sales'' taxes. In the end, all taxes fall on consumption. New taxes or old: raise taxes. Read my lips.

The corollary proposition is that no genuine constituency for spending controls can emerge unless taxpayers are squeezed till it hurts. On this there is, admittedly, a contrary school of thought, which holds that spending cannot be curtailed until the revenue spigot dries.

The flip response to this is to say ''$200-billion deficits as far as the eye can see.'' But on the whole, the U.S. experience rather bears it out, if belatedly: spending in the last years of the Reagan presidency has declined as a percentage of gross domestic product, for the first time in 30 years.

This is, however, less applicable in Canada, since the source of the trouble here is not runaway legislators but a harlot electorate. While starving the Congress of revenue might be a useful check on spending in the U.S., our own insatiable demands are more likely simply to be added onto the deficit.

Well, what of it? Why should taxation be preferred to borrowing as a technique of finance? Because, where governments intervene, force is superior to persuasion. Force cannot be evaded; a neutral tax, therefore, disrupts economic behavior to the minimum.

The consequences of shoveling billions in bonds into the economy, on the other hand, with billions more in interest to persuade investors to hold them, are quite disruptive. (Of the other methods of public finance, fraud - inflation - is no longer an option, and outright begging is open only to the Vatican.) The comparison often made to a corporation's investment practice is void. Would any company borrow to finance its spending, if it could simply take the funds?

This is what it comes down to. Why should any self-respecting state grovel in the capital markets for the money it needs? Just take it.