GIVING MORE power to the regime in Washington is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to bring America back to economic health. Here’s the proposal I’m bringing to the table at Tea Party rallies across the country this week.

1. Reducing regulations is primary, since regulation is what stifles commerce: the more regulations, the more it costs our economy. Most regulations are used by big international corporations to reduce competition, and competition would help us get out of this depression.

2. End the “war on drugs.” Make them legal (increase competition, drive out organized crime) and sold at any drug store. Allow people to decide what to take in — or not take in — to their bodies. Those who make bad decisions will eventually be weeded from the gene pool, just as they should be. We don’t need a police state and a prison on every corner to solve this problem.

3. Eliminate the intrusive and privacy-destroying income tax; have the states ratify an amendment withdrawing the 16th Amendment. We could replace it with something similar to the http://fairtax.org proposal (a federal sales tax) with the same amendment that removes the income tax and abolishes the IRS (preferably a sales tax only on new items).

This will reduce the number of “tax crimes” that good, honest people are in jail for. The tax code is tens of thousands of pages and no human being alive has even read all of it, much less knows for sure if he has “obeyed” every jot and tittle. This is why politically-motivated prosecutors can put almost anyone in jail if they want to: they can always find some violation of some obscure provision in anyone’s 1040 confession sheet. Eliminating the income tax will take away that illegitimate power.

It will also promote green living because people will save more and waste less by buying second hand. They will repair and reuse and wear things out — rather than just discard and buy new.

This new tax policy will financially assault the drug dealers and pimps and other organized criminals by forcing them to have to pay taxes when they spend their money, which will further reduce the benefit of dealing in illegal trade. Right now we are taking money from people’s pay checks before they get them and at the same time we don’t tax drug dealers or pimps or illegals or other economic criminals at all. We are penalizing working Americans. A sales tax will also encourage saving money rather than encouraging the leveraging of every dime you can get, like the income tax does.

This will encourage people in the underground economy to become part of the real economy. It will stop most of the turf killings. It will ease our immigration problems, since illegals will suddenly find themselves paying the federal taxes they were evading before by hiding behind stolen or fictitious identities. Offer illegals less welfare and charge them tax — and they won’t be so eager to come here.

4. Then cut every single expenditure of the government by 10%, and begin to draw down troops immediately from around the world. Relocate half of our hundreds of foreign military bases to our southern border to help the Border Patrol do its job.

5. We don’t need the Washington regime to run our insurance or our pension plan. Make sure workers get back every dime they paid in (how about not one cent of foreign aid until every American worker gets his money back), but grandfather Social Security and Medicare out of existence.

6. Pass an amendment to the Constitution that makes all laws and treaties have a four year sunset clause, with each law or treaty needing to be approved by a separate roll call vote every four years — or cease to exist. As I stated above, our income tax code alone is so complex that no one actually knows what the law even is. That goes double for federal laws in general.

When we have so many laws, they end up being enforced arbitrarily and selectively (in addition to stifling freedom). When laws are so numerous and complex that they can — or must — be selectively enforced or ignored, we no longer have a government of laws. We have reverted to a government of men — exactly what the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid.

7. We need to give up our role as the policeman of the world. Let other nations fight their own fights, as they have for thousands of years. The very idea of forcing “regime change” on “bad” governments is ludicrous. Ninety per cent. of governments are “bad” by our standards, and the regime in Washington isn’t so hot either, come to think of it. But other peoples have other standards. Let them work out their revolutions, if they want them, for themselves.

8. There should be no welfare to banks or other corporations. And the fractional reserve banking system — wherein we allow bankers, including but not limited to the Fed, to create our money out of thin air and then charge us interest on it — needs to be replaced by a more honest and failure-proof system.

I don’t expect the system politicians in Washington to listen. The Republicans are just as much in bed with the financial predators as are the Democrats. And Fox News and its little pet teapots like Sarah Palin are owned by predator-in-chief Rupert Murdoch, for God’s sake. That’s why we need to build the Tea Party movement into a truly independent force. No compromise. We need our freedom and our country back.