I have solved the Deficit! (Courtesy of the New York Times. ) And I even started paying down the debt! Piece of cake.

Of course, they only offered options that have already been discussed and weren’t throwing out new options.

I would like to simplify the income system to provide a single deduction for everyone, like the top of the 2nd quintile of income – currently about $35K – and then everyone pays 20% of their income greater than that, incrementing by 1%  for each step of the median household income – currently about $50K -up to a total of 55%.

I would also not allow any corporation to deduct any annual compensation in excess of the President’s annual salary as an expense. The corporation will need to treat such excessive compensation as profit and pay corporate taxes on it.

Basically, we the people dug a very big fiscal hole for ourselves over the past two generations and we need to start paying it back. If we want to add new services like universal health care, we the people need to be prepared to pay for it.

I saw somewhere that the US Personal Income is $14T and annual Employee Compensation is about $8T. Using these as ballpark figures, since everyone seems to have their own numbers, with our annual national health care costs running to $2.5T, we can impose a 30% payroll tax that goes exclusively to health care. None of putting these monies into the general funds. They are intended for health care and they stay in health care. (We ought to do the same with the Social Security monies as well.)  Then we implement a single payer system; everyone is covered by health care and the employers, who are contributing 50% of the payroll tax, can get out of the health care insurance business.  And when the medical costs plummet to more reasonable rates in a few years, the payroll tax can be reduced as well. The tax is meant to cover the annual medical costs, not run as a trust fund accumulating cash for future needs.