In what is advertised as a grand bargain between the right and the left, tax rates will be lowered, to appease conservatives, in return for closing many tax expenditures or “loopholes” (for some reason this is presented as a concession to liberals). Revenue that would otherwise be sheltered from taxation by the abolished loopholes would, to some degree, raise overall federal revenue collection, even with lower rates.

Allegedly centrist tax reform plans like Simpson-Bowles are presented by the media as nonpartisan compromises by serious, thoughtful, public-spirited experts willing to speak truth to selfish special interests. In reality the Simpson-Bowles plan and similar schemes  are best described as center-right. Generally these plans call not only for closing loopholes that disproportionately benefit the rich, like the home mortgage interest deduction, but also for cutting essential government benefits for the middle class, like Social Security and Medicare.

Alan Simpson famously mocked Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

The bargain at the core of plans like Bowles-Simpson — lowering income tax rates while reducing tax expenditures — isn’t a genuine bargain at all. If it is a good idea to raise needed revenue by closing loopholes while lowering income tax rates, why not raise even more revenue by closing loopholes without lowering income tax rates?  This kind of “grand bargain” is not based on give-and-take among two sides equally flexible and willing to bargain. Instead, it requires the center and the left to engage in unilateral surrender to extortion by the uncompromising right.

If Simpson-Bowles represents the center-right in the tax debate, the radical right is represented by flax-tax plans like the “Fair Tax” that would replace most or all federal taxes with a single national consumption tax with a single rate. A national consumption tax ought to play a role in federal tax reform — but as an addition to the mix of taxes, not as a replacement for all other taxes. A single flat tax would be extremely regressive, dramatically shifting the burden of taxation from the rich to the middle class and the poor.

Compared to the center-right and the far right, the American left has been relatively uninterested in devising plans for tax reform.  One reason is the justified focus of liberals on what the political scientist Jacob Hacker calls “pre-distribution,” like the growing pre-tax inequality highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Another factor is undoubtedly the fact that, unlike many conservatives, progressives do not believe that tax policy is all-important for economic growth, to the exclusion of other factors, like public investment, trade policy, energy policy and education. To the extent that there is a consensus on tax reform among American progressives, it would seem to combine higher taxes on the rich with more tax breaks for the middle class as well as the poor — the “Buffett Rule” (a minimum tax on millionaires) plus an expansion of the earned income tax credit, for example.

Unfortunately, when it comes to taxes, many American progressives think with their hearts, rather than with their heads. They want a welfare state on a European scale, but ignore the fact that European social democracies do not rely for revenue primarily on steep income taxes. Instead, the most generous European welfare states derive their funding from three kinds of taxes:  income taxes, payroll taxes and a consumption tax, the value-added tax (VAT). In contrast, the U.S. federal government derives its revenue chiefly from only two taxes:  the personal income tax and the payroll tax. In the U.S., consumption taxes are used by state and local governments but not by the federal government.

Michael Graetz of Columbia Law School points out that “the United States is a relatively low-tax country, but not with respect to income taxes … We typically collect about 12 percent of GDP in corporate and individual income taxes, while the OECD nations average about 13 percent. The biggest difference is that most other nations rely much more heavily on consumption taxes than we do: 11 percent of GDP in the OECD compared to about 5 percent in the United States. Indeed, we are the only OECD nation that does not impose a national level tax on sales of goods and services.”

This raises the possibility of a fourth option for American tax reform, distinct from the phony centrism of Simpson-Bowles (closing loopholes while lowering rates for the rich and cutting entitlements for the majority), radical conservatism (the single flat tax) and conventional progressivism (relying for more revenue chiefly on higher personal income taxes combined with bigger tax credits). The fourth option would reject the goal of revenue neutrality and acknowledge that, in a nation with an aging population, federal taxes can and should be permanently increased to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (These, like the rest of the American healthcare sector,  need to be made solvent by price reduction and price regulation, not rationing). Much or most of the needed additional revenue should come from the adoption by the federal government of a VAT.  A federal VAT’s revenues could be shared with state and local governments, partly replacing existing sales taxes.

This approach to radical tax reform could take more liberal or more conservative forms.   In a 2002 article and a 2007 book,  Michael Graetz has proposed one version, a “competitive tax plan” (CTP), which the Urban Institute recently analyzed.

The Graetz plan would use the revenues from a VAT to eliminate income taxes on Americans who make less than $100,000 a year.  It would also lower payroll taxes, by means of payroll tax rebates that would offset the regressiveness of the VAT.  As the tax expert Bruce Bartlett notes, the Graetz plan would eliminate popular support for income tax expenditures by eliminating income taxes on most of the middle class:  “The important thing is the basic idea of avoiding a frontal assault on tax expenditures that is likely to make trench warfare seem tame by comparison and instead just make them irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans.” A VAT can also be used to cut corporate income taxes that discourage production in the U.S., an option that the Urban Institute and the New America Foundation’s Economic Growth Program analyzed in a 2010 study.

The Graetz plan is revenue neutral but it could be tweaked to raise more revenue overall or to be more progressive. Any plan that attempts to compensate for the regressive nature of a VAT by means of credits or rebates for working Americans that would be administered through the payroll tax would necessarily reduce payroll tax revenues for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But that is a point in its favor. In a society in which more and more of the gains from economic growth are going to capital, rather than labor, it makes sense to shift from a system in which social insurance relies solely on payroll taxes to a new system in which it relies on a mix of payroll taxes and higher taxes on the consumption or non-wage income of the rich. Medicare has always been funded in part by payroll taxes and general revenues. Funding Social Security by general revenues or other dedicated taxes, in addition to payroll taxes, might permit not only income taxes but also payroll taxes to be permanently reduced for the majority of working Americans.

This approach to tax reform should appeal to progressives and genuine centrists for another reason. It would almost certainly doom the conservative project of replacing public social insurance programs with tax credits or private accounts subsidized through personal income tax expenditures, because only affluent Americans would pay income taxes and middle-class voters would no longer enjoy the benefits of those programs. Tax reform that limited income taxation to the affluent few could thus build support for the replacement of the unfair and inefficient private welfare state run through the IRS — a system that includes 401Ks, IRAs and tax credits for employer and individual health insurance — with a simpler, cheaper, more efficient system of public provision or public utility regulation in the fields of retirement security and healthcare.

Conservative Democrats and moderately conservative Republicans, masquerading as “bipartisan centrists,” have signaled that following this fall’s election they plan to push for the passage of tax reform along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles proposal in the lame duck Congress. But the American people deserve, and the American economy needs, a better option for tax reform than the pseudo-centrist proposal of further lowering tax rates on the rich while eliminating or capping tax expenditures.  Something along the lines of the Graetz plan that would use a federal VAT to cut both federal income taxes and payroll taxes for the working majority of Americans while providing adequate revenue for a twenty-first-century government is the truly radical tax reform that America needs.

The word “obsession” is no overstatement. According to the Consumer Federation of America, one in five Americans believes playing the lottery is the best way to secure his or her long-term financial future. The nation is so devoted to this form of gambling, in fact, that ABC News reports a boom in lottery ticket sales even during a recession. That translates to a record $50 billion spent on lottery tickets every year.

At that level of spending, the lottery is being seen as an investment and the trouble is that from a financial standpoint, it’s the worst kind of risk to take, because the chances of a return are so slim. Buying a lottery ticket isn’t like purchasing a volatile stock or even like playing the slot machines — both of which provide a comparatively reasonable chance of occasionally winning. On the contrary, most lotteries give you odds that are quite literally worse than your chances of being hit by lightning. Considering that, using one’s dwindling income on lottery tickets is a near guarantee to make one’s economic situation far worse – and according to estimates, that chunk is a troublingly large share of income for those who can least afford it.

Cornell University’s Garrick Blalock explains the trend by noting “that when people are feeling desperate, they are more likely to stop by the gas station and buy five lottery tickets, hoping they get a big windfall.” It’s a wholly irrational hope, of course. But at an individual level, at least the initial impulse to buy into the jackpot fantasy is vaguely understandable – we are, after all, hard-wired to believe such fantasies, especially in a media environment that tells us our wildest dreams are just a single wager away.

What’s far less rational — and far more disturbing — is the decision by governments to encourage those destructive impulses.

The whole point of republican democracy is for deliberative representative bodies to make considered policy decisions – and not to succumb to reflex. Yet, according to Bloomberg News, our legislatures are “redoubling” their sponsorship and promotion of lotteries, knowing full well they exact a hidden levy on so many citizens.

Why? As with so many public policy issues, it all goes back to the demonization of taxes. Rather than level with the public about what kind of tax rates are needed to fund the basic services, politicians would rather try to raise revenues through fees on voluntary acts — in this case, the buying of lottery tickets.

While such a tactic circumvents the typical scorched-earth fights over raising traditional taxes, it creates two problems: 1) states aren’t able to raise enough money to fund services from lotteries, whose revenues are inconsistent, and 2) the lottery revenues they do generate are tied up in illogical funding schemes — the kind that force everything from schools to open space preservation programs to veterans benefits to rely on compulsive gamblers playing games of chance.

Under what public-policy logic does that make any sense? None — and no matter how many millions of dollars the next overhyped lottery promises to raise, that fundamental truth will not change. Pretending it will only further weaves gambling pathologies into our culture, puts off a long-overdue discussion of taxes — and makes addressing genuine budget crises that much more difficult.

To add to this embarrassment of riches, the consumer group Citizens for Tax Justice reports that more than two dozen major corporations  — including GE, Boeing, Mattel and Verizon — paid no federal taxes between 2008 and 2011. They got a corporate tax break that was broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Corporate taxes today are at a 40-year-low — even as the executive suites at big corporations have become throne rooms where the crown jewels wind up in the personal vault of the CEO.

Then look at this report in The New York Times: Last year, among the 100 best-paid CEOs, the median income was more than 14 million, compared with the average annual American salary of $45,230. Combined, this happy hundred executives pulled down more than two billion dollars.

What’s more, according to the Times “… these CEO’s might seem like pikers. Top hedge fund managers collectively earned $14.4 billion last year.”  No wonder some of them are fighting to kill a provision in the recent Dodd-Frank reform law that would require disclosing the ratio of CEO pay to the median pay of their employees. One never wishes to upset the help, you know. It can lead to unrest.

That’s Wall Street — the metaphorical bestiary of the financial universe.  But there’s nothing metaphorical about the earnings of hedge fund tigers, private equity lions, and the top dogs at those big banks that were bailed out by tax dollars after they helped chase our economy off a cliff.

So what do these big moneyed nabobs have to complain about? Why are they whining about reform? And why are they funneling cash to super PACs aimed at bringing down Barack Obama, who many of them supported four years ago?

Because, writes Alec MacGillis in The New Republic — the president wants to raise their taxes. That’s right — while ordinary Americans are taxed at a top rate of 35 percent on their income, Congress allows hedge fund and private equity tycoons to pay only pay 15 percent of their compensation. The president wants them to pay more; still at a rate below what you might pay, and for that he’s being accused of – hold onto your combat helmets –  “class warfare.”  One Wall Street Midas, once an Obama fan, now his foe, told MacGillis that by making the rich a primary target, Obama is “[expletive deleted] on people who are successful.”

And can you believe this? Two years ago, when President Obama first tried to close that gaping loophole in our tax code, Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity fund, compared the President’s action to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

That’s the same Stephen Schwarzman whose agents in 2006 launched a predatory raid on a travel company in Colorado. His fund bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months – one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal.

To celebrate his 60th birthday Mr. Schwarzman rented the Park Avenue Armory here in New York at a cost of $3 million, including a gospel choir led by Patti LaBelle that serenaded him with “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Does he ever — his net worth is estimated at nearly $5 billion. Last year alone Schwarzman took home over $213 million in pay and dividends, a third more than 2010. Now he’s fundraising for Mitt Romney, who, like him, made his bundle on leveraged buyouts that left many American workers up the creek.

To add insult to injury, average taxpayers even help subsidize the private jet travel of the rich. On the Times’ DealBook blog, mergers and acquisitions expert Steven Davidoff writes, “If an outside security consultant determines that executives need a private jet and other services for their safety, the Internal Revenue Service cuts corporate chieftains a break. In such cases, the chief executive will pay a reduced tax bill or sometimes no tax at all.”

Are the CEOs really in danger? No, says Davidoff, “It’s a common corporate tax trick.”

Talk about your friendly skies. No wonder the people with money and influence don’t feel connected to the rest of the population. It’s as if they live in a foreign country at the top of the world, like their own private Switzerland, at heights so rarefied they can’t imagine life down below.

2) How is that possible?

Income generated from capital gains and dividends is taxed at a lower rate than wages and salary. The wealthiest Americans earn considerable income from their return on such investments.

3) How would the Buffett rule work?

By changing the tax code. The Paying A Fair Share Act of 2012 would create “a minimum effective tax rate for high-income taxpayers.” Regardless of whether their income derived from long-term capital gains, dividends, wages or salary, Americans earning over $2 million a year would be required to pay a tax rate equal to 30 percent of their total income. Americans earning between $1 million and $2 million would pay a graduated rate approaching 30 percent.

4) What impact would the Buffett rule have on the nation’s finances?

Trifling. Estimates of how much tax revenue would be generated by the Buffett rule range from $47 billion up to $160 billion over 10 years. Letting the Bush tax cuts on Americans earning over $250,000 a year expire would, in contrast, raise $800 billion over the next10 years.

5) What are the downsides of the Buffett rule?

From a progressive perspective, the downside is that the measure will not raise enough revenue to make a meaningful difference in the federal budget; the Buffett rule, in other words, won’t solve the problem of paying for increasing Medicare costs. Conservatives argue that higher taxes on the wealthy will depress investment and thus hurt job creation, but the evidence for that assertion is weak.

6) What are the chances that the Buffett rule will become law?

Zero. The Senate is scheduled to vote on the Paying A Fair Share Act of 2012 next week, but Democrats will be unable to reach the 60 votes necessary to break an inevitable Republican filibuster.

7) So what’s the point?

President Obama’s push for the Buffett rule is a strategic campaign move designed to capitalize on populist resentment generated by growing income inequality in America and to draw a sharp contrast between himself and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who only paid 14 percent of his income as taxes in 2010, on income of $42 million. It’s politics, pure and simple.

With gas taxes, we make the same mistake: We artificially depress the price of fuel so that the least efficient way to get somewhere — in this case, a private car — is also sometimes the cheapest.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has given us an opportunity to discuss this absurdity. On Tuesday, the New York Times revealed the true reason he killed plans for a new rail tunnel from New York to New Jersey. Yes, he was genuflecting before Tea Party deficit hawks, but, said the paper, the decision was actually “more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax.”

Washington gets some flak (not nearly enough) for not raising the federal gas tax. The last time it budged, a T-Rex was chasing Jeff Goldblum, and Meat Loaf was in the Top 40. But individual states are just as guilty of keeping their gas taxes frozen, which, because of inflation, effectively adds up to more deeply discounted gas every year. Fourteen states haven’t raised their gas taxes in at least two decades, including New Jersey, which now has the nation’s third-lowest rate — it hasn’t gone up since 1988. This has caused the state’s real-dollar gas-tax revenue to fall by 40 percent. By not keeping the tax apace with transportation costs, New Jersey loses half a billion dollars a year.

When we talk about the federal gas tax being too low, we talk about the fact that keeping the price of gas down encourages sprawl and discourages sales of fuel-efficient cars — both worthy concerns. But by ignoring the problem of states refusing to raise their rates as well, we miss out on the fact that, for instance, New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund is now $12.5 billion in debt. Wyoming last year voted down an attempt to raise its gas tax, the country’s second-lowest, which would have allowed it to repair underground storage tanks that are leaking petroleum into the earth. And South Carolina, which borrowed $52 million from Washington last year to close a budget gap created by its super-low gas tax, recently moved to cut that tax by 10 percent more.

And why not? Gas is expensive now, right? The truth is, the price of gas is unnaturally low, held down by governors who would sooner take a handout from Washington than increase the price by a penny per gallon. This thinking is creating a fiscal disaster for state governments. And it’s put New Jersey on track to earn a dubious distinction: By mid-century, it will become the first state in America to literally run out of land. By making “drive till you qualify” so cheap, all the Garden State’s unprotected open space will be completely gone in a few short decades.

Maybe it’s best if we just drive around it.