Here is a fascinating article in the New York Times analysing the tax system in America. The main theme of the article is that the tax burden on the American middle class is lower than the rest of the industrialized world and has not been reduced over the past 30 years by either the Reagan or Bush I & II's tax cuts. In fact, the tax cuts were gifts mainly to the richest in America and have reduced the total amount of income taken in by the federal government with no appreciable impact in stimulating the economy.

It seems that tax cut advocates have convinced Americans that their taxes are too high so that American will accept a reduced government. The point of cutting taxes is to "starve the beast" or according to Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, ''I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'' The point of reducing taxes is to create exactly the fiscal crisis that we are now facing in order to make it politically acceptable to reduce services.

But the benefits of tax cuts have not gone to the middle class. Any tax cuts for the middle class have been minimal and essentially a cover for radical cuts in taxes for the rich. The core of tax cutting plans have been cuts in dividend taxes, capital gains taxes, drastic reductions in tax rates on the highest incomes and repeal of estate taxes. The benefit of all of these tax cuts accrue disproportionally to the rich. According to this article, taxes were not cut for the middle class precisely in order to get the middle class angry that their taxes were too high. This way, the tax cut advocates could sell their plan of massive tax cuts for the rich by buying off the middle class with minimal tax cuts. So long as the middle class was getting something out of the deal, a tax cut package for the rich could sail through congress.

Essentially, "Tax Cuts" means "Cuts in Government Services." The question in the fiscal crisis we are now facing is whether we as middle class Americans want to cut services such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Police, Fire protection, and Schools or whether the minimal tax relief we receive is worth the loss of these services.

The conclusion of the New York Times article paints a frightening picture for middle-class Americans, especially those who are thinking about their retirement years or have already entered those years.

"If Grover Norquist is right -- and he has been right about a lot -- the coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians -- in the name of fiscal necessity -- to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.

"In Norquist's vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

"But as Governor Riley of Alabama reminds us, that's a choice, not a necessity. The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives -- whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren't such a bad thing after all -- is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be."