Regret to say, I think we're about to crash

Okay, here's the most important post this year: You reeeally need to click on the link and read this one. (If you wish, you can click on the link *there* to read the original source article.)

Short answer: To cover the CBO's projected federal deficit in 2016, and future Social Security and Medicare deficits, brings the combined tax rate--the total of federal, state, Social Security and Medicare taxes--on a middle-income taxpayer in California (someone making $60,000 per year) to an astounding 71%.

And of course then they'll pay another 8 percent sales tax (roughly) on anything they buy with the 29% they get to take home.

Okay, we'll admit California has a ridiculously high state income tax rate--9.5 percent on our $60K earner--so the rate on those of you from other states will be lower. But even here in flyover country, with a comparatively modest 5 or 6 percent rate, all levels of gummint together will be confiscating two-thirds of your income.

Are you ready to work under those conditions? I'm not.

For a couple of years now I've been using a metaphor from my flying days: Our jet is standing on its nose, screaming toward Ma Earth at very high speed. We're probably gonna die, but it's just barely possible that with heroic efforts--measures that won't be found in the emergency procedures checklist--we just might be able to pancake this big rascal into a soft cornfield somehow and enable at least some of the passengers to get out alive.

But every second we delay making exactly the right corrective action makes it less likely that any given number will survive.

Of course less than one percent of you have flown a jet, so the metaphor probably doesn't scare you to damn death. Maybe you can find a sufficiently scary metaphor from your own field. Combat veterans will understand. Firefighters, maybe. Rest of you will just have to imagine.

I really, sincerely hope I'm wrong about the terrible troubles I see ahead if we can't pull out of this dive. Because I know--as surely as the sun coming up tomorrow--that only a fraction of Americans will continue working if they only get to keep 29% of their nominal income.

A big chunk will likely go "off the grid" and become self-sufficient, earning just a fraction of what they make now--barely over the amount that requires filing. But they'll get to keep virtually all of it.

And you people who have kids: Are you willing to consign your children to a 71% total tax rate?

Honestly, I don't know if the Republicans in congress have both the will and the creativity to pull us out. But I know most of the Dems in congress are ideologically welded to our current course. As is their leader.