Thom, you've hit a home run with this installment. Now if you could only get the conservative rural crowd (who seem to be the backbone of the Republican Party) to read it! The problem, of course, is that a) most of them are too busy sucking up bread and circus (in today's terms, pizza, beer and football) to read anything, and b) that very soon none of them will be able to read at all. So what now .... ?

"We dont need no ....; ejucashun" ?

How government at all levels has come to raise revenue to pay for public goods and serivces is both inequitable and highly destructive. As economists such as Michael Hudson, Mason Gaffney and Joseph Stiglitz have argued, the rent of land and land-like assets (e.g., the broadcast spectrum or even take-off and landing slots at airports) is unearned by individuals or entities; rent is societally-created by a combination of aggregate demand and locational advantages (whether natural or by investment in public infrastructure).

The taxation of land (and, by extension, land rent) is in the United States a responsibility of local government. And, quite frankly, local governments have done a terrible job of keeping assessments up-to-date. The result is an almost-universally low effective rate of taxation on land values, causing a reliance on the taxation of property improvements, income from wages and commerce. Michael Hudson estimates that rent-derived income accounts for one-third of GDP. Another economist, Fred Foldvary, calculates that restructuring taxation to collect rents would result in at least a 10 percent increase in real GDP.

Getting all of the towns, cities, school districts, townships, boroughs, and counties to move to a land-only property tax base would require a degree of civic and political enlightenment not likely to occur. More practical is to capture rents via the state and federal individual income tax systems. This would require restructuring of the tax system to combine tax simplification with real progressivity. What might this look like?

The starting point would be for states and the federal government to exempt all individual incomes up to some level, say, the federal median income level. All other deductions and exemptions would be eliminated. Above this level, an increasing rate of taxation would be applied to higher and higher ranges of income.

That's exactly right. Democracy can't survive unless people have ready access to relevant information, which is both correct in detail and true in context. This was Thomas Jefferson's biggest worry throughout his life, and why the press is the only private industry singled out and given special protection in the Constitution.

It is supremely ironic that, in this day and age of mass communication and advanced information technologies, where virtually everyone literally has the entire data base of human knowledge tucked in their pockets, it is so difficult to get at the simple truth of things and to make informed, intelligent decisions in the political arena that affect the lives of everyone.

This new dark age is no accident. There are powerful forces that deliberately distort the truth to achieve self-serving goals, and there is a willing audience entertaining false narratives that seemingly lend support to agreeable religious and political ideologies and that assuage fear and insecurity. It is much easier to believe a comforting lie than to accept a hard truth.

Ignorance is not necessarily stupidity; willful ignorance certainly is.