Elected office should be a public service, as originally intended.  There was no plan for a permanent political class who would remain in office for decades.  It should be a penurious experience, with term limits, and one should be forbidden from profiting from the job before, during or after.  This would eliminate the showboats (you all know who they are and they infest both parties) from spending their entire lives directing the general populous who are obviously too ignorant or lazy to get about their own business.

Think about this for a minute.  60% of Americans pay no federal income taxes at all.  If I spend my money, I am careful to be sure I get good value.  If I spend your money, I'm not sure I care all that much about whether it is well spent.  Combine this with a cash circulation system sucking up funds from individuals, shipping it to Washington and handing it over to politicians who can send it back (reduced by their "expenses") to their districts to buy votes.  Sound efficient?

Subsidiarity.  This is a policy developed in the UK (under Thatcher) that basically said spend money as close to the populace that provides it.  Instead of the inverted pyramid we have where all the cash flows to the top for redistribution, the majority of funds should be collected and spent at the most local level possible.  Town, county, city, whatever.  Only a small amount should go on to the federal level for defense and national capital projects (like interstate highways).  If people who are directly accountable (and who the taxpayers see on the street every day) make the funding decisions, we'll get less pork and more local needs funded.

Actually a flat tax of 16% or so would provide the same funding, hit everyone equally hard, and ensure that everyone had a stake in how the collected taxes were spent.  As long as a majority makes no contribution, but decides how to spend, we are headed for continued trouble.  I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged to those re-distributionists on this thread.  There comes a point where those who work and contribute just give up when everything is taken from them.  The spiral from there looks like all the failed socialist economies of history (USSR, Pre-Capitalism China, Cuba, Nicaragua ... they're not hard to find if you look around).  If you tax something, you get less of it.  This is true of collective income as much as anything else.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to see where the current dilemma came from, it was Chris Dodd and Barney Frank using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to ensure massive loans were made to individuals who clearly would never be able to pay them back.  This monster, pushed to new heights by the Clinton administration (it has been headed by former Clinton cabinet members for 15 years) were REQUIRED BY STATUTE to back loans with no equity participation by the borrower and with no verification of income.  Very sound business practices.  As soon as the economy stumbled, defaults went through the roof and the securities issued by these "lenders" became worthless, taking the banking system to the brink.

So spare me the right or left wing conspiracies.  It was all done in daylight and the idiocy was there for all to see, complete with intermittant grandstanding by the collective genius of our Congress.

Hang on, its going to be a bumpy ride!

Lotus 123 ~ S-Render ~ OS/2 WARP ~ IBM 8088 / 4.77 Mhz ~ Hercules Ultima graphics, Hitachi 10 MB HDD, 64K RAM, 12 in diagonal CRT Monitor (16 colors / 60 Hz refresh rate), 240 Watt PS, Dual 1.44 MB Floppies, 2 button mouse input device.  Beige horizontal case.  I don't display my unit.