Government?We Don't Need No Stinkin' Gov't!

Of course we've got a budget crisis! We don't tax ourselves nearly enough.

That sentiment could get me drawn and quartered. But really? Representative Paul -- "it's not a budget, it's a hallucination" -- Ryan proposing to fix our crushing deficit with only budget cuts and not a single tax increase? And conservatives think lefties are nuts!

Even the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission's austere majority report realistically concluded it will take a formula of 1-to-2 in tax increases to spending reductions to fix the problem.

Ryan's $6.2 trillion budget and tax cutting proposal is nothing more than discredited Bush-era supply side economics on steroids.

His plan cuts corporate taxes and the top marginal individual rate to 25 percent from 35 percent. At 35 percent, the individual rate is already the lowest it's been since 1931, except for a five-year anomaly. You know when it was 25 percent last? From 1925 to 1931, during the run-up to the Great Depression. So much for the idea of low taxes creating jobs.

According to BusinessPundit.com, the U.S. has the second lowest marginal tax rate in the industrialized world of around 27 percent on average incomes: "By any objective measure, the United States and its relatively low tax rates offer the best of both worlds -- reasonable social safety nets and extraordinary economic capacity stemming from essentially free market policies."

Well, what'a ya know!

We could actually kick-up our tax rate by 5 percent, make sane fixes in entitlements, solve our deficit problem by 2025 and still rank among the six lowest taxed nations in the developed world.

As for the current corporate rate, in practice it averages around 17 percent placing U.S. corporate taxes third lowest in the 34-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

To add perspective, here are some countries with top individual tax rates of 25 percent: Bangladesh, Botswana, El Salvador, Latvia and Malaysia. And here are some countries whose percentage of tax revenue to GDP is similar to the 19 percent Ryan wants to impose on the U.S.: Belize, Djibouti, Ghana, Maldives, Senegal, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

That's it! That's what Ryan and the drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub lunkheads want? An America with a comparable rate of federal revenue to Bangladesh!

Wait! Now I get it! Ryan's budget make total sense. If we're going to tax ourselves like fourth world countries we certainly can't expect first world amenities. Go ahead, repeal health care, slash Medicaid and social services by 35 percent, privatize and gut Medicare, ignore infrastructure modernization and forsake support for clean energy, education and research.

Oh yeah and so much for those job-destroying, profit-killing federal regulations on food, drug, product and workplace safety and clean air, water and environmental protection.

I bet they don't have to worry about all that crap in Uzbekistan.