In the words of a great politician, Rahm Emanuel, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." So, okay, let's go. How about returning to a country whose federal government is governed by the United States Constitution? I went through the Constitution and listed the items that the Federal Government should be collecting taxes for. Here's my list: 1) Senators and representatives and President's compensation 2) pay the national debt 3) Provide for the common defense 3) provide for the common welfare (this does not include charity the founders were clear about that, charity is to be voluntary not mandated by government) 4) Establish Post office and Post Roads 5) Promote the Progress of Science and Useful arts (oh, sorry, not with money but with patents and copywrites, so scratch that one) 6) Army and Navy. So from what I could find, from the 2006 budget our federal budget should look something like this: National Defense $535,943,000,000 + Veterans Benefits $70,410,000,000 + Justice Administration $41,342,000,000 + International Affairs $34,750,000,000 + General Science, Space & Technology $23,996,000,000 + General Government $19,085,000,000 for a total of $725,526,000,000.
So here's my plan, eliminate the IRS and most of the other bureaucracies and put the tax collection responsibility on the states. The states can submit their share of the budget to the federal government. The states can fund and determine their own education and welfare goals as well as its other needs. The states need a rainy day fund for local disasters or other needs of its citizens. The states need to take care of their roads, bridges, etc, etc, etc, etc. The states can also collect the taxes in any manner they see fit; flat tax, sales tax, or income tax. The states can even go to outright socialism if that is what they want and pool all their money "for the common good". Every citizen can decide what state they want to live in, businesses can decide what state to set up shop in and those citizens can select the local government representatives that fit their lifestyles best.
Here's another great part to my plan. It won't really matter if Rahm Emanuel or Karl Rove does the next census. If they (I'm sure completely innocently) get the estimate numbers wrong, a state that gets another representative also, gets an increased federal tax bill. They may have more incentive to get the numbers right. Here's a few states bills under my plan, California $86,929,382,488, Florida $41,792,972,350; New York $48,479,847,926 and Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming would pay $1,671,718,894.
