Your premise is misdirected. Why do you presume that taxes need to be raised? Why not eliminate programs? At the federal level, why not start (but not finish) with the Department of Agriculture? (there are lots of other candidates after that)

Thank you

John Reseska

Crimes, junk food.

........ tax the income of the u.s. bourgeoisie - not workers or the poor!

Dear WNYC:

Please take away "The Take Away".

Gary

Why would we have to tax more. We have a huge percentage of our population working for the govt, making more then the average person. They must remember that they work for the people. If the people are making less money, so should they. There should be a 10% pay cut accross the board for ALL govt. workers. It isnt fair that we as tax pays must continue to be taxed to pay a govt worker more then the market price for their job.

We should tax energy production and distribution in function of long term pollution effects. We should tax corporate bad behavior including holding board directors and the companies they work for responsible for the behavior for the illegal or immoral conduct that happens under their watch when on the board of another company. Example: a person on the board of directors of Pepsi was also on the board of directors of Enron. Therefore, Pepsi could be held liable for Enron's behavior.

More immediate suggestions for CT specically that are easy to enforce:

Raise the tax on upper income tax returns. there can be a 6-9% marginal tax rate on certain groups of earners with income under $100,000. Increase the rate on the >$100,000 earners to be consistent. Tax income that is currently exempt from social security tax at a higher rate:

tax earned income >$100,000 at 0.5% more

tax unearned income on >$75,000 at 2.0% more.

Compensate for part of this by giving a credit for multi-person families.

Problem in some places seems to be corruption plus incompetence. For instance in North Plainfield NJ, according to one activist group, taxpayers are spending a large percentage of their taxes on servicing debt for borrowed money, some of which is now missing. (I saw this here: http://tinyurl.com/5vh8nk) This is being trotted out in the lead up to a political campaign -- it is interesting because some blame simple slovenly waste for high taxes, while others blame the large influx of Spanish speaking immigrants who are able to take advantage of non-enforcement of housing and zoning rules, which, according to them, increase the number of school children without a corresponding increase in taxes (as local taxes come from land owners only). Since there is no local journalistic coverage here in Somerset County, this tableaux of ordinary, though dramatic problems floats along year after year in a constant trickle of whispers and, from on the part of elected leaders, just silence -- with no side learning or collaborating from any other. Taxes are quite high. Yet residents are not very active. An upcoming reassessment of housing values after more than a decade of outdated assessments may just activate this town into reshaping itself.

We should tax those making more than $1mm at 50%. Those making more than $5mm at 75%. And there should be an asset tax on non-productive assets of 2%. This goes to the Fed and can be redistributed to the states proportional to the contribution. That way, the states cannot play "race to the bottom games."

This would also have the positive side-effect that executive and other out-sized salaries would shrink. As few have observed, when the tax system ceased to be genuinely progressive, the salaries became increasingly large.

Why not mandate balanced budgets? Write them into state constitutions? And mandate the elimination of deficits by, say, eight years from now? By the end of the second Obama term we'll be in good shape.

I would tax any new vehicle which gets less than 25 mpg.