The fact remains that we could easily increase revenues to cover necessary spending...if voters enforced their will on legislators. So many of our problems stem directly from the constant siphoning of wealth from the working and middle classes to the obscenely wealthy.

When my dad and stepmom were declining they needed to sell their rental home...they could no longer manage it and I lived too far away to help manage. This was in 2009 or so, after the real estate crash, and there were distressed properties throughout their Sacramento area neighborhood...and swarms of "all cash" buyers scooping them up. Far too many of these buyers were institutional, hedge fund types and this property transfer was going on across the nation.

So now, instead of "mom and pop" landlords using reasonable rents to fund their retirements and live in homeowners securing the neighborhoods we have profit motivated institutions driving rents as high as possible, squeezing tenants to the limit.

Add to this the decades long squeeze on wages which has working class people barely treading water and unable to pay much in taxes, the ever expanding ownership of equities in untaxed portfolios, the hiding of assets and returns in tax shelters and you get our current situation where the bottom 50% of us only hold 2.5% of the wealth and the top 10% hold 67%. This is unsustainable.

We need a working class paid enough that THEY can pay more than just their payroll tax, we need a remake of military procurement which wastes huge sums for systems the armed forces don't even want, we need universal and non-profit health care so we can cut that spending by a third, we need an extension of payroll taxes to FAR higher income levels...basically we need to attack this problem from both ends, expenditures AND revenues;)