Our government is the best that money can buy, literally. So long as it's "Government for the special interests, by the special interests, with an emotional crying game to the voters" we will experience a failed state era in 20 years...not that you'll care. You'll be long gone from Washington by then and will therefore be blame less. Ditto everyone in Congress.

My Fair Deal plan is simple - Remove the influence of special interests, dump the status quo tax system, and let the citizens decide for themselves how they want to live.

1 - A regressive, flat income tax. Set wage cut offs with a zero or 5% income tax for workers earning less than $30K per year. It's simple to collect, involves zero emotional manipulation, doesn't promote needless indebtedness, procreation, or bad marriages. It also doesn't punish citizens for saving and investing. This isn't the Industrial Age, why must we keep a tax code designed for that by-gone era?

1. Dump business taxes and charge a similar regressive rate based on sales. What McCain said is true and is easily verified by a Forbes/CNN article from 2 months ago. We have the second highest business taxes in the world. What isn't said is that we have a top heavy and expensive set of tax credits that actually LOWER business taxes, all in the name of economic stimulus and the special interests. It's time to admit the truth about business taxes and come clean.

2. Pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Quit lying to the voters and actually force the House to cut spending. One caveat: A formal declaration of War by Congress will allow for deficit spending. We currently have over $10T of on-book debt and $53T of off-book debt. We're headed for the breaking point -- China and other viable economies won't loan us more money. Not because we're not good for it, but because China's economy is cooling and they've cut the deals they need for oil and other materials to sustain themselves while we've been pursuing human rights while China's been going behind our backs saying "We don't care about human rights, we just want to trade with you."

3. Severely limit "investment" of Federal pension and Social Security dollars in Treasury securities. This is the equivalent of a company owned bank making loans to itself, then never paying back the money. Learn from Japan's mistakes AND from our own mistakes. If we'd put 50% of unspent Social Security funds into an S&P 500 index fund over the last 40 years, the so-called "fund" would be flush with cash, not empty.

4. Term Limits - Who really lies on their deathbed wishing they'd worked more? D.C. politicians that's who! Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. FDR made us forget this bit if philosophy, and it's time we re-discovered it.

5. Regulation, not Centralization. We're not socialist and socialism is incompatible with our society and our politics. Just ask anyone who grew up under Socialism and then immigrated to the US. Another point - You can regulate and industry, but you'll never get the government to be responsible.

6. Protect workers, not Unions. DON'T pass the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800, S. 1041) unless you want to see a scandalous report on how Unions are breaking legs, abusing children, and carrying out acts of terrorism in order to force closed-shops across the country. They attempted this back in the 80s at a Caterpiller factory. I saw it on 20/20 if you care.

7. Protect property rights - As a liberal, this will be extremely difficult for you. The "Common Good" often trumps the rights of the individual especially when there's money for the government on the line. Take this tact: You can't have the American Dream when some developer can have it forcibly taken from you in the name of economic stimulation.

8. Protect citizens' and employees' private data. Every time a government laptop or thumb drive is lost or stolen, our personal security is destroyed. Plus it's a violation of Title 5 (Privacy Act of 1974). Time to encrypt all such devices using authorized agent recoverable encryption.

That's enough ranting for now. Too bad you'll never read this. Maybe some staffer will spend two minutes glazing over it.