March 4, 2008 - Work, dinner, gym, Taco Bell, bed. What else could improve such a well planned day? Todays presidential issue is taxes. Taxes fund our local, state, and federal governments. Since this is a presidential issue, I will focus on federal taxes. Taxes need to exist to fund even extremely basic things like paying for the transportation of senators from their home state to Washington DC to debate national issues. I don't think we should expect politicians to pay out of their pocket for travel required to do their job. But I do think federal politicians have grossly over stepped the bounds of the intention of the constitution and what it allows them to do "for the common good". The biggest line item in the national budget is military spending. We spent about 10 times what China spends each year, just on the "official" defense budget. Then you throw in all the "emergency" spending requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the money hidden in other parts of the budget, such as the money the department of Energy spends on nuclear technology, and you have a very expensive defense budget. What if instead of spending gross amounts of money on bigger and nastier weapons, we spent it on forming peaceful coalitions, such as the UN? If we showed our commitment towards peace rather than being an aggressor, we might not need all those fancy weapons and defense programs. The next biggest budget item is spent on paying off our debt. Now I realize that over the history of our country, every effort that has been made to reduce the debt has caused a recession, but I think it is irresponsible to keep racking up additional debt. The same way a family must spent what it makes, the government must spent what it makes. Even though it is likely to cause a recession, we need to man up and pay off the debt through reduced spending. And speaking of reduced spending, we as taxpayers need better visibility of how much we are spending on taxes. Taxes are hidden everywhere, some big, some small, all adding up to a huge percent of my income. Income tax, payroll tax, state sales tax, local sales tax, excise fees (for fuel), social security, medicare, road tolls, taxes on my phone and cable bills, etc. I like the idea of paying a flat tax at the time you spend your money. Everyone pays a 30% tax or whatever it works out to, whenever they go out and spend money. Then at the end of the year, people who qualify because of their income or certain other situations are eligible for refunds. People who sit on their money for too long (keeping it out of the economy, and not subject to taxes, I'm looking at you rich people with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars) get maybe a tax every 7 years for money that doesn't churn. The point of income tax is to keep people from hoarding money, since without it, people with tons of money would shove their money into a bank account and keep it there, away from taxation. To prevent the lower and middle class from shouldering a large share of the tax burden to support our government, since those people tend to have to spend a larger portion of their annual income, we have to have some way to make sure that people with tons of money are contributing rather than sheltering their money.