A populist soundbite for taxes

Seek, and ye shall find...
Why Your Tax Cut Doesn't Add Up, from the April 12 issue of Newsweek (thanks to AlanF for helping me find it)

Now, how does this sound for a populist rallying cry... "75% of American families pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than they do in income tax".  Puts those Bush tax cuts in perspective, doesn't it?  And once you have their attention, you can explain how regressive payroll taxes are, etc.

Of course, there's a catch... such a rallying cry leads to "What are you going to do about it?", which means a complete, radical overhaul of the tax code. And John Kerry is many things, but "radical" is not one of them!

Still, the tax code is basically screwing the poor and middle class now, and it NEEDS to be radically overhauled.  If it isn't, then Bushco and the GOP will just keep chipping and tweaking, shifting more and more burden from Bush's base to, say, us. A VAT isn't too far off just to keep the government from going broke.

Now, who would we prefer rewriting the tax code... a reinvigorated, populist Democratic Party, or the GOP?