Reddit reviews A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic

The government will be smaller next year than it is this year: you are already getting that, so nothing to negotiate there.

Then this should be easy.

Military spending needs a significant haircut.

No disagreement.

Entitlements have already been cut,

You crack me up. It makes sense that we're having a hard time coming to terms, apparently we live in alternative realities. In mine:

> Spending on entitlements is the highest in American history. In 2010, entitlement spending had grown to be almost 100 times higher than it was in 1960; it has increased by an explosive 9.5 percent per year for 50 straight years. Entitlement transfer payments to individuals (such as for income, healthcare, age, and unemployment) have been growing twice as fast as per capita income for 20 years, totaling $2.2 trillion in 2010 alone—which was greater than the entire gross domestic product of Italy and roughly the same as the GDP of Great Britain.

but further significant cuts may be acceptable. will be required.

FTFY. You gotta cut from where the money goes if you're going to see real results.

Effective corporate tax rates need to be raised. The amount that corporations pay needs to increase towards what published rates actually are.

Whether they are called loopholes, dodges or what-not, you're correct. The tax code is too complex and too imbalanced. I agree completely that too many corporations - and individuals - are getting "favorable" treatment that is unfair, corrupt and disruptive. I'd like to see the tax code reduced to a simple yet progressive tax for all tax payers, including not just corporations but people. Everybody needs to have skin in the game so the alternative minimum tax is set at 5% for ALL income and escalates based upon both gross and net receipts on some kind of linear (not logarithmic) scale. The objective of taxes is to raise money, not social engineering and most definitely not to reward the failures and punish the successful. The entire tax code should be a couple of hundred pages long and should require a plebiscite to change - Congress has simply and repeatedly demonstrated that it is not capable of handling the job.

As for the ACA individual mandate, consider it payment for needlessly incurring billions of dollars of wasted expense that taxpayers will need to cover while also putting more than 800 thousand people out of work for several weeks.

No.*

I want a law that says that all future debt ceilings are raised automatically if authorization is not passed by Congress. The automatic authorization would include mandatory cumulative reductions of 1% of government spending levels AND 1.5% tax increases on personal and corporate income tax every 30 days until a budget or CR was passed by a super-majorities of BOTH houses of Congress.

Now that you've got that out of your system, I want a law that says Congress shuts down if a budget isn't passed every year. I want a law that says deficit spending requires plebiscite approval. I want a law that says I'm handsome and will live forever. Neither one of us is going to see all of our wishes come true.

Write your Congressman today and tell him what you're willing to compromise on and to start negotiating (no, really, and in good faith) in order to resolve this. The problem isn't the intransigent Republicans, it's the ochlocratic Democrats.

Peace. I'm moving on.