Taxes

It's tax season and people around the country are finishing up (or already finished) reporting their income and paying their taxes. Meanwhile, at InterAction I'm writing a paper on Innovative Financing for Development, which addresses a variety of tax options on currency transactions, financial transactions or big banks as a way to raise money for development and global health programs.  At  the same time, Congress is fighting over the budget and while taxes aren't really part of the fight, they actually are.

On that note, I want to make a few points
1. We do have a budget problem, and we do need to work to balance it
2. Cutting from the "non-defense discretionary budget" will not balance the budget. Even if we eliminated the entire "non-defense discretionary" budget, we'd still have a deficit
3. Some programs absolutely cannot be cut
4. The proposals put forth in HR 1 would be like pulling the safety net out from under a tightrope walker.  People all over the country (and the world) live day to day, week to week, and do not have a secure financial future.  The proposed cuts take away any safety net they have.
5. There are other ways to balance the budget than just cutting spending (hint: look at the title of this post).

So here's my recommendation, and before I continue, don't get your hopes up, this isn't a complete solution, and I'm not going to go into a ton of detail because I haven't studied the numbers very carefully, but I have enough to present a basic idea.

MY RECOMMENDATION: raise taxes (shhh...don't tell the rich beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts that I said this).

 I'm not saying to raise taxes on everybody.  In fact in most cases I wouldn't even say raise taxes, I'd simply eliminate tax cuts to the wealthy.  Along with that, we need to close corporate tax loopholes.  There are far too many deductions, shelters and other tax-reducing tactics that big businesses use to avoid paying their fair share. I'm not going to propose a solution to our tax problems right now, but we need to work on our tax policies.  Americans expect services from the government, but we don't want to pay for them. Take a look at most European countries.  They pay far higher taxes than we do, yet we expect most of the same services, that's unrealistic.  We need to take a good hard look at what we expect from our government, and what we are willing to pay to get it.

I'm thinking I'll need to come back with a more detailed post on this later, but this is all I have time for now.  Remember, I'm not saying we should raise taxes on everyone, but we do need to at least have taxes on the table as we seek to solve our budget issues.