It's easy to wind up owing more taxes than you have withheld -- just have more than one job counted on the same return. It would matter *how* delinquent the federal employee is as to whether to bring the hammer down.

The solution is to eliminate everything from the national budget that is not specifically and literally authorized under the Enumerated Powers. No DoEd, no DHHS, no DoL, no DoE, Federal Reserve, EPA, USDA, FDA, NPR, SS, Medicare, Natl Endowment for the X, etc. Strip it right down to the bone and make Congress actually DO every job it is tasked with doing instead of passing it off to professional bureaucrats who A) continually expand their areas of influence in order to increase their own power base, and B) are unanswerable to the voters. Return everything else to the States where it has always belonged. Would this be painful? Yes. It would not, however, be as painful as the now-inevitable passing of the US into the status of a failed...

The Fair Tax Proposal that I have seen is regressive against lower income earners, and open-ended for politicians to squeeze whatever amount they decide out of the public. Remember, anything that politicians can pass, they can later change to suit themselves.

Major fallacy in your proposal: You assume that there is enough trade to double our GDP. This is the "continuous growth" idea behind Ponzi schemes. Reality is that all growth uses resources. Many of those resources are finite, others have a renewal limit. Assuming that any growth can be sustained can be exploded by using the "double a penny for every square on a checkerboard" test. Even if you postulate a growth of 3% per year, once you start doing the math, it soon becomes obvious that it's a pipe dream. After a while, ALL growth reaches the limits imposed by environmental factors.

"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." -- Ambrose Bierce Corporations' legal "personhood" needs to be removed and the law changed so that any time a corporation is convicted of a crime, every person within it that had responsibility for making sure no such crime happened would be convicted of it and sent to prison, including the entire board of directors. To hell with fining the corporation and leaving the real criminals untouched.

Bob, pull your head out and grow the f^@k up. 1) Democrats have had control of Congress for most of the time that SS has been in existence with the fund being raided for other spending. 2) Social Security was never sustainable. It is a Ponzi scheme, and is the reason that Congress specifically exempted itself and the government from the law that made Ponzi schemes illegal!

The Fed helped engineer the collapse by keeping interest rates low. Every stock bubble has been accompanied by sustained low interest rates encouraging over-extension of credit. The Fed is owned by US and foreign banks that make profits off of manipulation of currencies. They'll tank one to make profits, then build that one up and tank another. The Fed is an inherently pernicious and parasitical entity that needs to be abolished, and control of the US money supply returned to the Treasury where it has always belonged.

It is not a (insert moronic insult) talking point; it is a legally established fact. Multiple court decisions have defined Social Security as a TAX. Period. The government IS NOT LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO PAY OUT ANY OF IT. That is why the so-called "Social Security fund" has been raided by Congress for decades, without let or hindrance. They could, tomorrow, pass a bill nullifying the entire thing AND NEVER OWE A CENT TO ANYONE. Just as they could with every other entitlement program. It is not a pension fund. It is not a saving fund. It is a government-controlled entitlement program that could be discontinued at any time. The fact that most of the country CONSIDER it to be money owed to them as a pension fund makes doing that political...

Don't blame the other side for joining in the ad hominem vilification hate-fest that your side has been wallowing in for at least the past half-century.

@ Dondi & Carol: Haliburton won the 10-year contingency contract on a bid during the Clinton administration. The supposed "no-bid contracts" were part of this contract to provide services on an as-needed (contingency) basis.