MeGusta wrote:While I would not be as abrasive or confrontational as my colleague
Hey, Harlowe can't help being abrasive.
Kulaf wrote:Just curious......have you had a change of heart on the Bush tax cuts or did you simply omit expiring them?
I'm still in favor of expiring the Bush tax cuts. The reason it's not selected in my solution is because the "Eliminate loopholes, but keep taxes slightly higher" option superceded the expire Bush tax cuts option.
I haven't posted a solution simply because the options I'd use aren't there:
The tax code needs a complete overhaul to both simplify and eliminate loopholes. There's no good reason for any tax system to be more than a hundred pages or so (ours is no better over here). Set the base taxation rate at a sufficient level to cover normal expenditure. This alone would cause a titanic shift in the economy, although you'd end up with a lot of unemployed accountants if the tax code were simple enough for everyone to understand.
The health system needs a complete overhaul as well. Eliminate Medicare, Medicaid and the like and start again with a government provided safety net for everyone with private options on top of that.
Stop treating SS as a separate entity. Roll it into consolidated revenue and fund it normally through taxation. It's more efficient to do that than create artificial financial barriers within government.
Cut defense spending by 20-30%. At least. Scale down the size of the military and start making the rest of the world take an active interest instead of letting the US do their dirty work.
Eliminate every national security agency that isn't the DoD, FBI and CIA. Those three can easily subsume the roles of the others.
My gut feel is to eliminate the tax-free nature of home loans and also eliminate Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae/etc. They distort the market and put risk on the government that should really stay with the banks. I know that one will be contentious though.
Umm... there's more but that's enough naive suggestions for now.
No it doesn't. It simply means that the US cannot ignore debts. It says nothing about the US's ability to pay them. Basically Congress does not have the power to declare invalid any debt that it has inccured by law. However it does not deal at all with the ability to pay the debt.
