Well, I am very much a "Liberal" in the traditional sense of the word. See any dictionary if you don't know what I mean. I think it is very much a concern of us "liberals" that in the U.S. it is very difficult for anyone of modest means , or less, to obtain competent legal representation in a court of law. That concerns me, because I believe that to maintain a country on the basis of law everyone, regardless of means, needs access to competent legal representation. That's something we don't have in the U.S.A. That is especially true in criminal law. I'm opposed, by the way, to letting lawyers make laws. It, to me, is a clear cut case of conflict of interest. Therefore if had my druthers I would forbid any lawyer from serving in a legislative body. Which is just the opposite of what we have now. I'm in favor of tort reform, but not in the form of arbitrary caps on damages. That would be just as absurd as mandatory sentencing. The kind of tort reform I favor is nothing like what is being proposed. I don't know what "bleeding heart" liberal means. Maybe you can explain it.
The rich will always have access to better lawyers as money will always get you better service. The question is how to bridge the gap of the quality of lawyers available to the poor versus the rich or how not to overburden public defense attorneys to the point that they give bad quality work to their clients. I know some states have mandatory pro-bono work to alleviate some of the workload on public defenders, one being New Jersey. I don't know about not having lawyers in the process of making laws. If you don't want lawyers to make the laws, they at least need to be well versed in the law and its history but not many people have that without being lawyers. Would I want someone from Goldman Sachs running a regulatory body for finance? No, but I would want someone that was a trader or worked in the financial field so they know what to look for. I don't think its possible to get rid of all conflicts of interest. Bsam, unless you have some actual counter points, I'm not going to go on about myself or my family on this board. You can probably figure it out anyway since I have actual knowledge about this issue unlike some here.
Over the years I've observed that it is common to think that someone we know little about can't be working as hard as we are and is making too much money for the work they are doing. It is not easy to appreciate the other man or woman's work that you know relatively little of substance about.
US can print dollars to buy OPEC oil. Other countries have to buy/borrow US dollars. There is only about $900 billion paper and coin dollars. There is about $14 trillion dollars worth of credit supplied by banks. There is about $55 trillion dollars in total debt, again, supplied by banks. What backs the dollar is the faith that the $14 trillion dollars will some day pay the $55 trillion dollars (plus $217 trillion dollars derivatives contracts) off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_money
You've, identified what is perhaps the second most important benefit to come from well-thought-out tax reform: evening out the tax burden so that virtually everyone pays their fair share and it is very difficult, if not impossible, for the underground economy to escape paying their share. That probably amounts to billions. The most important benefit of going to something like a national sales tax is of course the billion or so man hours saved each year. You can't go to a sales tax however without protecting the poor somehow because they spend their entire income. But there is no reason that can't be worked out. Even more important than tax reform however is fiscal reform at the federal level! It is just that now is not the time for austerity measures. In fact the government needs to leverage up even more to create a million jobs building infrastructure. Ultimately we will recover those costs in the form of higher living standards for everyone. As military expenditures are brought down to reasonable levels, new jobs in a public and private sector partnership building infrastructure can be created and nurtured using many of the same formerly unproductive dollars that were used to maintain bases in over 60 countries and military personnel in over 150 countries around the world. These things must be coordinated. If we don't do them, ten years from now we will still have unacceptably high unemployment, a still smaller middle class, and still lag the rest of the industrialized world in infrastructure. Once the economy starts running on all cylinders again it will be time to raise interest rates and taxes. I am a firm believer in Keynesian economics, but both the part that applies in recessions and the part that applies in boom times. When you borrow money in hard times, you must pay it back in good times.