Ned's Solution to the Deficit 'Crisis'

According to the Commerce Department, personal income in the U.S. was about 12.5 trillion dollars last year. Of that, about half went to the top 10%, which has seen its tax rates steadily decline since 1981. The U.S. now has the greatest income inequality in the developed world. Here's how Ned would solve the financial mess we are in.
First, we need to understand why we are in this mess. It is due to a conscious policy of lowering taxes for members of the Sneering Plutocracy and the Paris Hilton crowd, on the part of Republicans and their lickspittle rentboys among complaisant Democrats, beginning with Reagan. It got much worse under Bush II, and now the income inequality is more or less the same as in 1928. We need to fix that.
We need to go back to the tax rates that JFK put into effect in 1962. At that time, the Democrats lowered the top marginal tax rate from 90%, where it was under Eisenhower, to 70%, and that applied to any income over $200k. If we go back to that rate, and even index it for inflation, we can capture about a trillion dollars which is now held in the grasping fists of the uber-rich, and most of which is sitting in money market accounts or third, fourth and fifth homes, here and abroad. Capturing a trillion dollars would go a long way to fixing the state and local government crises, and would virtually eliminate the federal deficit. Then, we add a transaction tax onto stock and bond trades, which could get about a hundred billion more.
This wold allow us to stop fixating on the poor public employee grunt making 60 grand a year. Then, we eliminate the upper income limit on the payroll tax, which should gain another couple of hundred billion, and that wlll fix social security (which really doesn't need fixing) and go a log way towards fixing Medicare.
Then we tax sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and foods with too much salt.
All of these will go a long way towards restoring income levels to those appropriate for a free democracy, and move us away from the inequality more representative of Russia under the tsars.
If we still need to fix something, we can look at gasoline.

The New Feudalism

For those disgruntled authoritarians among Ned's readers, he can report that feudalism, thought to have gone belly-up in the 17th century in the West and the early 20th in Russia, may be alive and well after all. In Sunday's NYT is a report that describes yet again the growing income inequality in the US. According to this, at present there is a 42% chance that a person born to a man and woman in the lowest fifth of the income scale will remain at that income level for life. This compares to a 30% chance for an English child and a 25% chance of a child born in commie pinko Sweden.
Ned's point is that as soon as that chance gets above 50% we can herald the arrival of The New Feudalism in the Greatest Country The World Has Ever Seen Or Ever Will See!
Ned wishes all his friends, serfs or not, a Happy New Year.