First, our national goal must be security through savings and investment so that every American has the chance to become an entrepreneur, own a home, or afford higher education. The Securing America Plan includes a Child Development Account, a Citizen Saves Account, a double Earned Income Tax Credit, and a child-care tax deduction patterned after the home mortgage deduction. This suggested package of initiatives, to replace the president's proposed tax cuts, shifts our national priorities from further accumulation of wealth at the top to supporting our working families in their struggle for economic security.

...The hallmark of twenty-first century economics must be security: security against violence; security of livelihood; security of community; and security of our progeny.

For most of the last century, our tax system has been based upon income. We must now consider, instead, progressively taxing consumption and destruction. Since the early 1980s, I have proposed a national debate about taxing consumption and thus encouraging greater savings. We cannot accumulate the capital we require for national rebuilding, restructuring, and renewal with our persistent low savings rates. While we consume our wealth, we depend on investment from overseas to finance our debt and even our defense, sending much of the profits from our own productivity abroad. After a few years of public surpluses and debt reduction, we are now back to deficits and massive borrowing from foreign investors and, perhaps most troublingly, our children.

We can increase savings, reduce borrowing, and increase our productivity modernization by fundamentally changing our tax structure. This is what tax reform ought to be about, not mindlessly reducing public revenues in a way that creates huge structural deficits, but rather, shifting what we tax in order to enhance economic growth. Income saved and productively invested should be encouraged.

And we should increase taxes on habits that hurt our country—pollution, wasteful energy uses, unnecessary plundering of our resources, and our throw-away culture. As six percent of the world's population, we consume more than a quarter of the world's energy and produce over a quarter of the world's pollution and trash. Both consumption taxes and environmental taxes would help restore a proper system of public values. Let's tax effluents and impose user fees on a graduated basis and dedicate the revenues to children's health.