Recent messages from voters can be confusing.  “Stand up and fight,” and “quit fighting and get something done” or “stop the bitter, partisan fighting” and “stop the President, Pelosi and Reid” all add to a cacophony of voices.  What do we make of them, and of elections in Massachusettes, Virginia, and New Jersey?

Well, when you mix these sounds with a close look at the now $14 trillion of public debt on the government’s books (and $50-100 trillion more in commitments to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security recipients), my conclusion about what Americans want and need in government is a new group of “grown-ups.”

What I want, and what I believe a growing number of Americans want, are public servants who place the nation’s interests above their own. They want maturity, judgment, seriousness of mind and a commitment to results — not just rhetoric.

Part of being a grown up in public life — at a time when it is so much needed – is putting forward serious, credible, intellectually consistent ideas and concepts.  That’s why the President’s stimulus plan, and his bizarre mix of spending increases, credit card spending and calls for spending freezes –all at the same time –really makes it hard to take him seriously, regardless of his party or ideology.

Lately, I wonder how folks like Larry Summers, the President’s economic policy advisor, sleeps at night. What does Summers and other credible advisors to the President think when he advocates tax incentives to encourage small business to hire people and raise wages when those same companies don’t have new revenue or new customers to justify such expenditures?  That idea wouldn’t survive a high school economics class.

How do serious people in and around the President feel when they watch him sign a ten percent, across-the-board spending increase in the FY2010 budget just days before he calls for a 3-year freeze in spending?  Do they blush?
How do the President’s advisors reconcile his call for billions more in education spending on the same day he begs for another “blue ribbon commission” designed to force him and Congress out of their drunken debt binge?  What did they think as they sat in on secret negotiations, held just days before the State of the Union address, which resulted in a $1.9 trillion increase to the nation’s credit card?

It’s time for grown-ups to take over government again.  If the Republican party can be the first to prove itself that party, it can and will win the right again to govern, and may well have a modest chance to save this nation from suicide.

Beware of strangers offering gifts:  Our eroding tax base

About one-third of Americans who file annual tax returns pay no federal income tax.  Of those who do pay taxes, the half who earn the least pays less than three percent of all income tax revenues.  Is that a great success story, i.e. less taxes, sticking it to the “rich” etc.?  Or, is it evidence of a tax burden placed on too few, and an unfair, dangerous imbalance within and among American taxpayers?
I say it’s more of the latter.  I prefer a broader, flatter, lower income tax system in which Americans looking right and left in their neighborhood, church pew and work place can assume that their neighbors pay a “fair share” and where we all share a common interest in low, fair and sound tax policies.

In 1986, when Ronald Reagan last lead America to lower and simplify its tax code –a tax code that once again has grown into an abomination – about one-fifth of taxpayers paid no net income taxes.  In 2006, it was one out of three.  With current policies advanced by the President, and by ’08 candidate John McCain, that number will trend toward almost half of taxpayers paying nothing at all!

To move toward fiscal sanity, strong growth, less debt and a more fair form of government, we’ll need to return to a broad shouldered tax policy.

February 1, 2010