Since the war on terror began in 2001, Washington has sounded an intermittent drumbeat for the wealthy to make a greater "sacrifice" in the form of higher taxes. The dubious charge is that these taxpayers have been shirking a duty performed in other conflicts.

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Of course, the tax impact on the economy does not measure taxes' impact on income groups. So are the wealthy paying relatively less? According to an analysis of the latest IRS data (2006) by Congress' Joint Economic Committee, just the opposite is true.

The top 50% of income tax filers paid 97% of all income taxes. The top 5% paid 60%, and the top 1% paid 40% of all collected federal income taxes. Each of these levels is the highest recorded for which we have comparable data — since 1986's fundamental tax reform.

"Sacrifice" is evidently not lacking on the tax side of the federal fiscal equation. The spending side is a different story, however.

If there is a lack of "sacrifice," it lies not with the taxpayers but with the "tax takers."

Washington's talk of "sacrifice" is no more than a stalking horse in the left's hunt for higher taxes. This call for higher taxes is not so much about funding the war against terrorism as it is about the left's desire to use the tax code to redistribute income.

The contrast between taxes and spending during the current and past three conflicts could not be starker. And it could not demonstrate more clearly the left's divergent view of taxes. It differs fundamentally from the rest of America's.

Examining the "sacrifice" charge, we see that income taxes as a percentage of the economy actually have a higher average during the current conflict — 8.1% from 2001-07 — than in any of the previous three: slightly higher than Vietnam's 8% and far higher than the Korean War and even WWII's percentages.

The overall federal tax burden shows a similar relationship. The current period's 17.9% of GDP is close to Vietnam's 18% level and far higher than WWII's or Korea's.

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Automotive chiefs are meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with their hands out. At issue: vast pension obligations to 780,000 retired workers that already add $2,300 to the cost of every new car sold. Credit-strapped consumers want value, not pension-inflated price tags. So, the bailout is in the works.

Bankruptcy is a better solution, but if a bailout can't be stopped, taxpayers are owed a reckoning about how this industry got into a situation that a downturn could knock it over. This ought to be a condition for the bailout.

Unions are at the center of every problem affecting industry competitiveness. It's not only the United Auto Workers' lavish pensions, generous health care and leaden bureaucracies, it's unions' reflexive hostility to free trade.Yet if profits matter, new markets can return automotive companies to profitability — and rid the industry of the dead weight of those pensions.

Heritage Vice President Mike Franc made two key observations about the election results in a National Review Online symposium.

First, with the defeat of Republican moderates, "returning House Republicans will be more uniformly conservative. To the extent congressional Republicans plan to rediscover their inner conservative selves, this enhanced ideological uniformity will serve them well."

Secondly, and more importantly, Franc notes that "the exit polls, to the extent they can be believed, remind us once again that America remains a decisively right-of-center nation."

Liberal remains a dirty word. In fact, many more Americans continue to self-identify as conservative (34 percent) than as liberal (only 22 percent). Knowing this, successful Democratic candidates across the country used conservative rhetoric and themes to score points against their Republican opponents and win the hearts of voters. The Democrats' repeated refrain on behalf of middle class tax relief was but one of several such examples.

• Voters in California, Arizona and Florida approved measures defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The California measure, a constitutional amendment, was particularly notable since an activist court ruled earlier this year that the state law upholding traditional marriage was unconstitutional. Heritage's Thomas Messner recently explained why preserving traditional marriage is critical to ensuring religious liberty.

• "The U.S. government arrested and deported record numbers of illegal immigrants — nearly 350,000 — in the past year," the AP reports. "It has also naturalized a record number of new Americans during the same time period, more than 1 million."

• With the unemployment rate on the rise, President-elect Obama has called for a new economic "stimulus" package. Heritage economist Bill Beach recently spelled out ways to more effectively generate economic recovery than government spending.

On Tuesday, American voters elected Senator Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States. His Democratic Party allies also realized substantial gains in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

In a column circulated nationwide, Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner explains what this election means for conservatives.

An abiding belief in our country's greatness, tinged with optimism, has long been a cornerstone of conservatism. And Obama's been tacitly leaning toward conservative ideas since he became the Democratic nominee. Even though his record indicated he was the most liberal candidate in (at least) a generation, he ran as a conservative on major issues like taxes (promising to cut them), the military (vowing to add some 92,000 new troops) and energy (saying he'd at least consider offshore drilling).

"The problem," he continues,

is that both political parties have failed Americans

In recent years the Republican Party, which in Reagan's hands carried the conservative standard to new heights, lost its way. Federal spending now tops $25,000 per household annually, and the coming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs of 77 million retiring baby boomers threaten to add another $12,000 per household to the taxpayers' annual tab. Yet neither party offers a solution to the entitlement crisis or a real plan to cut spending.

Superintendent: “Appropriate action” will be taken against teacher who lectured serviceman’s daughter

Armey, Gingrich: Republicans spent their way to the wilderness

However, in the midst of the Bush-bashing, I want to point out something Gingrich says. He states that as long as the government spends multi-trillion dollars every year, lobbyists will gather to get their share, distorting the political process and leading to corruption. The only way to reduce or eliminate the influence of lobbyists in Washington is to reduce the amount of spoils they can grab.

Gingrich is right, and so is Armey, as far as they go.  That process also works in reverse, though, something both Armey and Gingrich neglect to mention.  Armey does some measure of self-congratulation in noting the roles of himself, Gingrich, and John Boehner in opposing the “old bulls” of the party in 1994 and winning with the Contract with America.  What neither Armey nor Gingrich mention is the parallel “K Street Project” that Republicans launched to get lobbyists harnessed to the Republican Party.  In order to do that, they needed to guarantee spoils to these lobbyists, which meant more money spent at the federal level and an explosion in earmark spending.

We can certainly criticize the Bush administration for its high-spending ways, but let’s not kid ourselves that the Republican problems started with W’s inauguration.  The seeds of the spending explosion got planted in that K Street Project, and that signaled the end of small-government conservatism in that era.  Gingrich is right in that we need to cut spending in order to minimize the influence of lobbyists, but we can’t trust any party to do that when they’re busily bribing lobbyists in order to support a supposedly “permanent majority”.  Republicans forgot why they wanted that power, and got seduced by it instead, and well before Bush took office.

Obama website: Hey, let’s make community service compulsory for students

Intriguing. Will that be in lieu of or in addition to the three months of compulsory civil defense training Rahm Emanuel wants 18-to-25-year-olds to do?

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

Presumably, the penalty for being a 20-year-old who doesn’t want to spend two hours a week picking up trash would be not graduating. The penalty for dodging Emanuel’s program, only Rahm knows. I remember this subject coming up now and again in poli sci classes and my leftish professor arguing that a peacetime draft would violate the right of privacy sketched out in cases like Roe as an infringement of one’s physical autonomy. If The One pushes ahead with this, it’ll be fun watching conservatives suddenly trying to coopt that right and liberals just as suddenly trying to narrow it. (On which side, do you suppose, will the ACLU come down?) Alternatively, you could skip the right of privacy and try a First Amendment argument: If the state can’t compel students to say the pledge of allegiance, arguably it can’t make them go clean parks, either. That case would turn on the distinction between speech and conduct; given the current composition of the Court, refuseniks would stand at least a shot of winning.

It bears noting that Maverick’s also always been famously gung ho for kids doing some form of national service — “There should be more focus on meeting national goals and on making short-term service, both civilian and military, a rite of passage for young Americans,” he wrote in the Washington Monthly(!) in 2001 — but he’s been careful, at least lately, to say that it should be volunteer-only. Exit question: Won’t a lot of conservatives, especially older ones, dig this idea? Keeps kids busy and out of trouble, teaches spoiled teens responsibility, etc.

A bright spot for Republicans: governors

If that’s true, then who are the nascent leaders that the GOP needs to tap?  Cillizza picks five, in ascending order:

• Haley Barbour
• Mark Sanford
• Sarah Palin
• Tim Pawlenty
• Bobby Jindal

I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.

I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.

And I will institute an independent defense priorities board to ensure that the Quadrennial Defense Review is not used to justify unnecessary spending.

Third, I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons.  To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear weapons, I will seek a ban on the production of fissile material,

and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBM's off hair-trigger alert and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal.