What You'd Cut

Don't worry. I haven't dropped this ball. In fact, I intend to run with it some more and hope you can help. Here's my intention, but I'll need to beg a little of your patience. I'm taking notes on all your suggestions for saving money - both current spending and future liabilities - and hope to come up with a serious wish-list for righting our fiscal mess. My idea is to then send the program to some independent experts - on the right and left - who will give us a rough idea of whether we have achieved the goal of retruning the government to fiscal sanity. One ground-rule: we keep the current income tax rates and payroll taxes, but we can remove deductions or tax shelters. I know many will call that raising taxes. So be it. I like the broad reductions in rates because they don't penalize success. I'm also open to restoring the gas tax to where it was years ago (or more, if necessary) and restoring the estate tax. But the main point of this is to cut spending - on entitlements and discretionary spending, including parts of the defense budget, if needs be. I've set up a new AOL address to receive your suggestions: WhatIdCut@aol.com. Keep them coming.

The trouble is: this takes time and effort and focus and my book deadline is April 1. I'm nearly there but don't have time to do all this right now. I'm not ducking this. I think we could do a real service by hashing this out. Maybe some of us fiscal conservatives can even come to some agreement with moderate liberals on what a reasonable solution might be. But give me a few weeks or so to revisit this. Deal? Meanwhile, keep the suggestions for cuts coming. Pretend you're a dictator who can impose a solution. Once again: WhatIdCut@aol.com - no apostrophes. The politicians seem unable to solve this. So maybe an army of fiscal Davids can. Have at it.