Up here, spending seemed to take a back seat to taxes. It was one of my frustrations with the group (locally, anyway).

I mean, in all honesty, the "damage" that could be reasonably expected by having the top tax rate go up 3% is *nothing* compared to the spending spiralling up to who-knows-where.

It seems to me there has to be a top-to-bottom review of taxation and spending because our existing system has been patched, loopholed, ammended, wrenched, fixed, broken, fixed again, broken again and put in a splint more times than I can count. In my industry we'd say that it's been "one-plussed to death" and suffers from "feature creep".