“By attempting to tackle both problems in one blow, it merely gets twice the opposition.”

That is untrue. You actually have, for the most part, the same people opposing both problems. You might as well have only one battle and concetrate your resources to fight that battle. If you break it into two battles it will cost you twice as much and take twice as long.

The infrastructure crumbles
While I must service debt–
The situation humbles,
But I´ve no answer yet.

Meanwhile the dollars that I pay
In tax rain havoc in Iraq,
In their deployment with no say
Unable yet to take them back.

Taxes require a high percent
While I keep nearly threadbare poor,
Meanwhile largesse of government
Has plenty to expend on war.

The infrastructure crumbles,
Who knows what else is yet
To come–stock market tumbles,
Deflation? Take your bet.

The bombs are falling in Iraq
And in Afghanistan today,
While who knows where discharges flak
In secret places none will say?

Meanwhile one hardly makes the rent,
Though treading water far from shore:
One works to serve the government
So that it may conduct the war.

The infrastructure crumbles,
While people curse–upset–
The bureaucratic bumbles
Which can´t do nothing yet.

The infrastructure of Iraq
We have destroyed, but yet we may
Not fix our own, so how, alack,
Might we make reparations, eh?

I pay my taxes, one red cent
Not with representation, or
A say in how the government
Disperses it, e.g. on war.

The infrastructure crumbles,
The hungry belly rumbles,
The government yet fumbles
And bumbles its attack;
The population grumbles,
While politicians´ mumbles
Do little as war stumbles
On daily in Iraq.

One problem is that the Congress is required by law to consider only revenue-neutral tax reform bills. And they definitely follow this law.

I’ve not studied the proposal in depth, but it might be the case that the reform is currently revenue-neutral, as the AMT is not expected to start dinging a significant number of taxpayers until next year.

I’d start with military spending; we can easily cut a couple hundred billion out of our military spending without compromising security.

What would you cut?

I favor a balanced budget. If we want to lower taxes, then we must also reduce spending. If all we do is cut taxes, then we just get deficit spending, which passes the problem on to future generations. So I would tackle spending first; once we get the deficit under control, then we can lower taxes. I’d start with military spending; we can easily cut a couple hundred billion out of our military spending without compromising security. All we’d lose is the ability to invade small countries on a whim.

That is the beauty of this plan, that is isn’t tax neutral. It takes $ 840 billion dollars out of the hands of the looters, puts it back in the hands of the people it belongs to, and forces the looters to find a way to cut the already bloated federal budget.

Sounds like a winner to me.

I have long favored a completely different kind of tax, which I’ll call a “footprint” tax. It is applied to commodities based on their net negative impact on the rest of the population. In other words, if you want to burn some gasoline, then you have to pay a tax based on the damage that you do to everybody else’s world.

I also believe that some progressiveness in the tax system is quite appropriate, both to fairly represent the differential benefits of government on rich and poor, and to reduce the Gini Index.