This is exactly my point. It "low taxes" was the cure-all, we'd be swimming in it (taxation as a percentage of GDP is pretty damn low right now - lowest since the 1950s if I remember correctly)

Yet how come high-tax, high-union Canada is doing so well? I know part of it was that they didn't have the same kind of real-estate problem we did. But that's because THEIR regulators didn't allow their banks to do what ours did.

I read an article today about Canada shrinking it's government in the 1990s, setting the stage for more stability. It didn't even mean losing a lot of government jobs - it was more along the lines of handing out fewer and smaller checks to people.