Solving our debt, naive though it may be

I'm am going to make this short and sweet. Excuse my naivete, but this is how it should work. If we're going to have income tax, it should be on a sliding scale. The lowest wage earners get the lowest tax rates, the highest wage earners get the highest tax rates (and I'm talking about the 90% range as it was in the 50s). The smallest businesses get the smallest tax rates, the biggest corporations get the highest tax rates (and I'm talking about corporations such as GE that didn't pay any taxes in 2010. In fact, it got a $3.2 billion tax refund!). No loopholes whatsoever.

We have a choice. As Chalmers Johnson says in his Blowback trilogy, we can be either an empire or a democracy, but not both. Therefore, we should cut defense spending by at least half, more likely three quarters and eliminate the majority of our bases around the world and in the United States.

According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories.

We should quit invading and bombing countries that do not have any imminent threat against us.

We should not even THINK of cutting entitlements. I agree that we continue to try eliminating waste in the systems. That's always a good thing. However, cutting benefits is outright wrong. We are not animals who throw the sick and infirm out of the pack.

Any Senator or Representative who disagrees with this is not representing our country honestly and should be voted out of office. Of course, this goes back to my "people are not smart" opinion.

But this is how it should be.