The elimination of payroll taxes is what this guy, you might have heard of him (Neal Boortz) has been trying to advocate for a while now.  Seemes like a good idea, but he wanted to replace all the government revenue with a 23% national sales tax so all those poor loafers who haven't been paying into the system would finally have to put out.  I read his book, only because an ultra-libertarian friend of mine laid it on my desk and I went through looking for weaknesses, and the biggest one I could find was that consumer prices were supposed to come down a correspondingly 23% and everybody from the guy holding the 'will work for food' sign to Cheney himself would get a 'prebate' check for all the basic necessities like food and home heating.  Really sounds like an excuse to just jack up the prices on everybody...

I am still skeptical that eliminating payroll taxes would leave consumer prices unchanged because corporations, and vis a vis the normal taxpayer, would still pick up the tab, but all those k street thugs and H&R block types would be outta bisness too, so it might not be all bad

Sure, David, tell Al to run in 2008, I'll vote for him, just like I voted for him in 2000.

I am glad I was not in attendance, however.  I definitely would have dozed off after he got a third of the way through.

It is much much better to have the thing on paper.  Thanks.

And there are lots of gems, here and there.

Here is something that caught my eye early on:
<<
After all, many Americans are tired of borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the Persian Gulf to make huge amounts of pollution that destroys the planet's climate. Increasingly, Americans believe that we have to change every part of that pattern.
>>

The first sentence is rhetorically exquisite.  The second sentence may or may not be true; I rather hope it is true.

My understanding, actually, is that we in the US do not depend so heavily ourselves on petroleum from the Middle East, but our major trading partners in Europe and East Asia do.  So "securing the Persian Gulf" is immediately more for the sake of the Germans and the Japanese.  With American beneficiaries further down the road.

And all the more so, now that China and India are big players.

Mein Gott!, should it not be clear by now that ANWR, and what remains in the Gulf of Mexico, is very slim pickin's indeed?

Regarding Al Gore on nuclear, David might have represented him well enough, upshot-wise, but to be fair, Al has clearly thought long and hard on the matter.

Anyway: Yes, David, I like to take pot-shots at leading Democrats in a Jonathan-Alterish way, but really, I have always liked Al Gore.  Thanks for printing out this text.  Probably, in a most energy-inefficient way, I shall need to print it out on paper, however.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

I wonder if Al Gore reads Grist.

His carbon tax reform is revolutionary and news worthy.

Venturing out into technical solutions is a minefield.  His statements on buildings and plug-in hybrids are right on.  

Some popular Carter era technologies have been proven not economically efficient, such as Stirling engines, silicon pv, and ethanol.  I still hope for substantial funding of university managed research on carbon-neutral energy with very strong emphasis on economic and energy metrics.

During the Cold War the U.S. exported research and power plant nuclear reactors to the buffer states surrounding the Soviets for the indigenous production of nuclear weapons.  It was thought that nuclear war was inevitable and that launched warheads "made in Germany or Pakistan" would be more likely a limited nuclear war.

And I am worried about the hidden message on developing nation-state nuclear reactors.  Candidate Kerry alluded to this when he acknowledged the emerging problem with Iran.  I hope this is not an unannounced war with nuclear technology as an excuse.  

Will 2008 be another preemptive wartime election?

David, a carbon freeze doesn't mean that there can't be new sources of emissions, just that they have to be offset by reductions in current sources.  You accomplish this by selling permits to emit a certain amount of CO2, and cap those permits at the current level of emissions.  In practice, only suppliers of fossil fuels would need permits to sell their fuel and that tax would get passed on to consumers.  This is how Kyoto was supposed to be implemented on a national level.

Usually when you're selling a limited number of permits, you auction them off and let the market decide what their value is.  But you couldn't guarantee that would be revenue-neutral.  Maybe Gore plans on issuing permits at a fixed price.  It would be interesting if permits were transferable, creating a market for investors to snap up cheap permits and sell them later to desperate polluters at a profit...