House Speaker Boehner, at the behest of Tea Partiers, has drawn a line in the sand. Two trillion dollars in budget cuts is the price Republicans want in return for voting to raise the debt limit. No new taxes will be part of this deficit reduction deal. These terms are non-negotiable.

Well, I have my own plan to meet the deficit challenge. And it’s also non-negotiable. It involves taxes that Boehner and company say can’t be raised at all.

The first element of my non-negotiable plan focuses on income taxes. Doing away with Bush-era income tax cuts for the well-to-do is not going to produce nearly enough revenue. So I demand a return to the 39.6 percent top marginal rate that existed before the Clinton era.

Will this hurt the spending needed to power the economy? Absolutely. But not nearly as much as the hurt to national spending power that will occur if Boehner’s own program cuts become law.

I next demand a sharp rise in the trustafarian tax, formerly known as the ‘estate tax’ or the ‘death tax’ in conservative circles.This tax should not be increased on estates of the size that presently are excluded, estates no larger than $5 million. Estates over that amount, however, should be taxed at the rate of 70 percent or higher, rather than the present rate of 35 percent. Along with generating a lot of extra revenue, this will be a positive thing for the otherwise wasted lives that will be led by people who inherit great wealth without earning it.

Now to Wall Street, a collection of institutions that caused much of this present crisis. First here I demand a Tobin Tax on flash volume traders. This will not only bring in a huge sum, but help deflate a current stock market bubble that if allowed to continue inflating will have truly awful consequences. Also In the Wall Street realm, hedge fund babies sometimes walking away with more than a billion dollars a year should be taxed as the corporate rate, not the present LLC rate. LLC identities are supposed to be for small entrepreneurs, not a few sharpies who wax fat on others’ miseries.

About corporate taxes generally. I demand present business tax rates be retained, but that certain write-offs be done away with. Not only ones for the hugely profitable oil industry, but those slipped into the tax code by the likes of GE.

Would this approach to business taxes hurt most companies? Very few, except for those that have used their lobbying power for special tax breaks. The reason most other companies would not be hurt is because they make their money from sales, not tax breaks, and taking two trillion dollars worth of spending power out of the pockets of poor and middle class consumers will devastate a great many companies’ bottom lines.

It’s time government policy-setters started thinking like real businesspeople, not think tank theorists. Time they realized that from a real businessperson’s perspective, it’s better to pay taxes on income from customers who have money to spend, than not have to pay taxes because you’re not making money from people who don’t have the money to spend.

All my demands are non-negotiable. But so, too, are Speaker Boehner’s. So how do we resolve the differences? Easy. With a referendum.

We say to Americans: Do you want to funnel more of the nation’s wealth to the rich, to Wall Street, to a few large corporations and their CEOs, at the expense of health care, education, and infrastructure, or do you prefer we do things the way I demand. I’m willing to abide by the vote.

We do need a referendum about this, by the way, because this choice won’t be on the ballot next year. Democrats, like Republicans. have their hands out to the rich, to Wall Street, to big business contributors. Which when you remember what the Democratic Party used to stand for, it really kind of sad.

Of course, instead of hoping that Democrats will ever again fight for what they once fought for, a third party might have to do the job. Indeed, a recent poll indicated a majority of Americans would like to see a third party on the ballot in 2012. Wouldn’t that be nice?

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