To faze out the income tax

To faze out the income tax is a better idea than abolishing it. First of all if you are really interested in getting rid of it then you have to realize that it will create a radical change and that Americans tend to reject radical change. Secondly getting rid of it at a single stroke would leave a whole lot of our most vulnerable in the lurch; folks like our seniors and disabled vets who paid their dues and now deserve our support.

Many professionals like bookkeepers and accountants have built up their life around the income tax and would have to start over with no warning or easing into it. Many business models rely on servicing it and so forth. In other words too many people and their families would be ruined today if the income tax went away today. You might not be sympathetic to their plight, but you should be sensible to their opposition and how desperate you want to make them.

My proposal therefore is to turn the income tax collection, and the services provided by the income tax, over to the states.From that point it would be much easier to faze out a state income tax than a national one. While all the states might start out with the same rate and system within a few years the states would begin to compete for ranking in efficiency and rates would lower.

As the ideal of subsidiarity gains ground there will be a snowballing effect as families redeem their responsibilities from the government. Parents armed with better teaching software will tend to take on more of the education of their children. Now that everyone realizes that the baby boomers are going to bust the government retirement idea we will see more families figuring out how to handle these issues on their own.

Now that the safety, nutrition, and supply of our food has come into question, people have become more interested in growing their own and buying it locally from folks they know. This means less need for the government to have their nose in it, and therefore less need for government. Other than our imported food it is hard to make a case for much of the "inspections" that go on because the companies that produce the food have a greater stake in avoiding media exposure than the government union drone with his rubber stamp.

As to our national defense I think most of the cost of it has to do with the fact that we think we can always make things better by sending our boys overseas. Once we realize that knees on the ground in most cases is more effective than boots on the ground in combating evil, we will send more prayers and less boots overseas. The remaining costs can be raised in the way we used to fund our military with tariffs and a hybrid army of paid professionals and trained volunteers.

The times do not allow for a small military, but we could do much with quite a bit less, especially considering how many of our citizens are armed and what could be done with reserve and national guard units.There are almost no other needs that can only be organized at the national level, and actually the states could be required to keep a proportionate number of state guardsmen at the ready in a standard of readiness overseen by the federal government. This would aproximate the medieval model of knights maintained by nobles who were under a King thus limiting the power of the King (or in our case the federal government)to do anything but organize against an invasion.