Taxing times

I was driving around yesterday, having spent hundreds of dollars I did not actually want to spend on new tires, I felt a need to put some miles on the tires, forgetting for a second the cost of fuel I was wasting on the driving. It was a perfect day to just be out and about, so I turned on the radio and opened the sunroof and enjoyed the warm afternoon.

There was an NPR program on and the host was interviewing a famed economist from Harvard who was about to go and speak the truth and you and I know full well how little anyone wants to hear the truth.

Quick tangent, I had a date last night with someone who has not seen me in a few weeks. I walk in the room, say hello and I am greeted with, "have you gained weight?" See? Sometimes we do not want to hear the truth, we like some sort of varnished version of the truth, like, "hey, you look great."

So I am driving around listening to this famed economist who has two answers for our countries economic trouble. First, he agreed with Standard and Poor's recent decision to downgrade the American credit rating. He said it will be going lower. The host was nice enough to ask if there was a solution to the countries long term debt problems and the answer was yes, yes there was.

Ready? Raise all taxes by 2/3 forever. Heck, that seems simple enough. But no one, especially the empty suits who are elected to congress would ever vote for such a tax increase, especially one for the wealthy, so that concept of actually raising the money to pay off our debts would be almost impossible. So, the host asked, seeing that it would be close to impossible to raise the taxes necessary to pay off the debts, what could we do. "Oh," the famed economist said, " we could cut all spending by 40 percent."

That was the other option, all spending, from defense to Social Security to Medicare to school lunch programs. Every federal dollar, from the road workers to the congressional pay, cut by 40 percent, immediately and forever.

Those were the only real options available to honestly deal with the countries debt. Oh sure, we will have a pretend commission here and there, making small cuts and promises of more, because that is the way our elected wussies do things. They never really do anything on their own watch, they always make cuts for the next elected group to deal with, and that never happens. Thus we keep growing our long term debt, pretending that it will never come due.

The famed economist had no dog in this race, he was just a smart guy looking at numbers. Congress and presidents always have friends to pay off and voters who don't like to feel a pinch. The problem is, generation after generation have used the same accounting tricks to push off the long term problems and those problems have now come home to roost. Our European brothers are under the same cloud and the world will soon be forced to deal. Default, 40 percent cut, a huge tax increase, there will not be a pretty and simple solution. Of course, we could raise taxes by about 30 percent across the board and cut all federal spending, every program, every dollar by 20 percent, that might work.

I know, I would rather just open the sunroof and go for a long drive too.