Ed Wallace:

“Right. It takes unconventional and courageous thinking to come up with a plan that clears a highway lane for the well off, while the middle class and working poor are left to inhale each other’s $5-a-gallon exhaust fumes. The worst thing about this ill-conceived decision … is it allocates freedom of movement according to income.”
— From “Diamond Lanes for the Rich,” by Tim Rutten (Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2008)
Few think of it this way, but America already has a major flat tax that we all pay equally: the 18.4-cent federal tax that is applied to each and every gallon of gasoline we purchase, or the 24.4 cents on every gallon of diesel. Say a young person, who just lost his job at McDonald’s, buys a gallon of gas to get to an interview at Burger King at the same time Warren Buffet buys a gallon of gas to get to the airport in Omaha to board his personal jet: Both the unemployed, below-minimum-wage worker and America’s richest billionaire contribute the exact same amount toward the nation’s highway system on that day.
Now, however, we are being told – to an increasingly urgent drumbeat – that America can no longer afford the luxury of building new infrastructure or even maintaining our current road system, because there’s just no funding for these programs. It’s here that the complete absence of critical thinking about America’s future should astonish and dismay anyone who looks at the facts even casually.

Anthony Kaufman:

If “An Inconvenient Truth” sounded the alarm on global warming, “I.O.U.S.A.,” a new documentary opening in theaters Friday, hopes to do the same for the rising federal deficit.
Backed by Blackstone Group Chairman Peter Peterson, “I.O.U.S.A.” follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and the Concord Coalition’s Robert Bixby on a “fiscal wake-up tour” across America. In the movie, which is co-written by “Empire of Debt” co-author Addison Wiggin and directed by “Wordplay” filmmaker Patrick Creadon, Messrs. Walker and Bixby argue that unless the government alters its policies and spending habits, the U.S. will be in for a serious financial meltdown.