Paul O'Neill for president! I mean it!

O'Neill, former Alcoa Chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary, has proposed some sensible and innovative ideas to fix our broken nation.

O'Neill notes that we spend on an annual basis $420 billion to administer and collect the federal income tax and that uncollected income tax revenue, primarily from the underground economy, is about $400 billion. He supports scrapping the IRS Tax Code, all 60,000 pages of it, concluding that this convoluted, incomprehensible system of taxation "provides proof that we are not an intelligent people." Why have the major party candidates for president not proposed this type of tax reform? Is it because it is too radical ... that powerful lobbyists would not like it? Could it be that they feel the current system is the most fair and best means of funding the government? Please!

If O'Neill's tax system reform were enacted, it would be reasonable to conclude that we would "find" most of the amount to fill the $1 trillion+ deficit hole we are currently running up each year.

O'Neill notes that the means to avoid the economic collapse that the nation experienced most recently is to require 20 percent down payments for mortgages and banks to hold 20 percent of their equity in liquid assets. Bravo!

Given Secretary O'Neill's visionary ideas, it is easy to see why his stint as Treasury Secretary in the George W. Bush administration was brief and ill-fated, and why he did not get along with neither "W" nor "Vice" Dick "Deficits Don't Matter" Cheney. Would most people side with Cheney today, or have we awakened and smelled the coffee, recognizing that the $16 trillion we owe, an amount which is climbing ever-higher, threatens to bury us?

There would be many barriers to O'Neill becoming president: he would not run, he would not be likely to win if he ran because is not well-known or charismatic and his reasonable ideas would upset the status quo. Lord knows, we mustn't upset the status quo! Look how far adherence to it has gotten us!