Wyden’s Tax Dream OR The Sum of All Deficits

The Oregonian front-paged Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) Fair Flat Tax Act today, in honor of the the season, but the article focused largely on how much easier it would make filling out your forms and a reshifting of the tax burden back to the wealthy and corporations.

Lost in the article, however, is the fact that Wyden’s plan — which he and Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) hope to make a key Democratic issue in the next round of elections — doesn’t even begin to address the fiscal mess this country is in. While the $100 billion of reductions to the deficit in his plan sounds like a lot, that amount is spread over five years, making it an average of just $20 billion/year. That would result in about a 4% reduction in the deficit which is going to do very little to address the enormous, increasing national debt, for which Congress just raised the borrowing limit to $9 trillion dollars.

More on the FFTA here.