We can balance the budget; we did. We can unbalance the budget; unfortunately, we did that too. Two parts go into balancing any budget: income and outgo. Trying for a balance without taking both into account does not work. How about what happens when we take neither into account? We tried that too. We cut income and raised outgo — lowered taxes and started a couple of expensive wars. How did we expect that to work?

Right now we are on a path that will lead to our grandchildren going as bankrupt as today’s Greece. This is not alarmism, it is just dollars and cents — or, dollars and sense. We can balance the budget again; we must. We must reverse the enslavement of those who are now being born.

So what are hard questions, the responsible answers? Certainly we can do better than jingles. “No new taxes” is no more an answer than, “Only the little people pay taxes.” Come to think about it, the two thoughts sound as if they might come from the same mindset. We must ask if taxes are a robbery by big, bad government or a fair payment for the many services we demand from hard-working civil servants. And we must start to pay for the answers in real time.

Fairness is important as well. One major unfairness in today’s tax structure — and one that some are trying to make much worse — is the difference in the way that wages are taxed versus the way we tax, or increasingly do not tax, investment income. Wage earners pay Social Security, federal taxes and either sales tax or state income tax — sometimes both. Capital gains and dividend income is only taxed fully by states. Of course, investors are mobile; they can choose to live in states without income tax and shop in states without sales tax.

So we must ask why it matters how we make our money. How fair is it to tax one kind of income so much more than another? The first dollar paid to an entry-level worker making beds or digging ditches is taxed for Social Security. There is no comparable tax on investment income. Federal and state taxes fall most fully on blue-, pink- and lower-paid white-collar workers. They usually cannot take advantage of the many elements of itemized deductions and must make do with the much smaller standard deduction. Most unfairly, there is no worksheet in the IRS book that lets you avoid paying any tax at all on $34,000 of your income because you earned it with the sweat of your brow, the sale of 40 hours of your life — not by sending your money out to make more money. What possible justification is there for changing the capital tax rate to zero? None.

The old graduated federal income tax was not as unequal as the simplified idea that rich people paid taxes at a high rate. A billionaire paid the same on his first $40,000 as the one who only made $40,000. The difference came in how the additional chunks of $40,000 were taxed increasingly more highly. There were many brackets and many chunks of $40,000. The oft-bemoaned 90 percent rate was paid on only the highest bracket. These were the “old taxes” that current anti-tax pledgers are calling “new taxes.”

I might be willing to live in a system that levees only the “old taxes” that we paid before 2001, back in the day of the balanced budget. What I would really like is a system where all income was taxed the same, including payments to Social Security. One step in that direction would be to take the advice of Warren Buffet — put Congress into the Social Security system. But that is the start of another discussion.