BBQMan:

Eliminate the mortgage interest deduction and you destroy the housing market - even for small starter homes. Congratulations, you've single-handedly wiped out The American Dream. Now - if you want to talk about limits on it? THat's a different story.

Mind you, this is through the veil of the fact that I live in NH, but your idea for more taxes on larger homes is already in effect here. Larger lots mean much larger taxes for fewer services. For example, a one-acre lot with one house only has one family requiring services (especially school funding). That same lot divided by four means four families costing the town a LOT more than the incremental increase in taxes (4 houses on the lot versus one).

I like the golf-cart-community idea. More advance planning is NOT a bad thing. Heck, it was my accidental discovery of a story about The Villages that brought me to this site in the first place.

I also like the idea of HAVING THE OPTION of taking the train. I can see a terribly under-used line out my window across the river.

I also agree with shifting to nukes to generate electricity. For coal (mining issues aside) I'd like to know how clean the modern versions of Fischer-Tropsch (german invention that turns coal into liquid fuels) are. They were pretty dirty in SOuth Africa (as they were under an embargo they only had coal available) but I hear it's much better now.

One thing I don't want to see is a GPS transponder recording my every move. Way too much Big Brother for me. I *do* have an EZ-Pass transponder for the toll roads around here and maybe that's where we're headed. Local roads financed locally (property taxes, vehicle registrations, etc) and the interstates all become tolled with EZ-Pass or license plate photo recognition cameras set up at strategic points.

Either way, we're going to have to pay for it SOMEhow.