President Obama has a problem. We all have a problem. We also have a partial solution.

The problem is money. We do not have enough of it coming into Washington.

We do not have enough to cover what Congress and the Bush guys spent.  And we have nowhere near enough to cover what the Obama budgets call for.

Here is a modest rescue plan. That is, a plan to bring more bucks to D.C. painlessly.

1.  Simplify the tax code. Bring in an extra $100 billion per year.

The President has just appointed Paul Volcker to head a commission to study how to simplify our tax code.  Good move. I hope he recommends something as simple as the flat tax. Or a system with just a couple of tax rates and virtually no deductions. If he does, I hope we are smart enough to adopt such a tax.

A number of countries have. They report huge gains in income for government.  When Russia switched to a flat tax their tax revenues rose by 25 percent first year.  By 25 percent more the next year. By 15 percent more the next year.

Suppose we switched to a flat tax. And our tax revenues rose a mere 10 percent.  That is an extra $100 billion per year in extra revenue. And the government could then save billions by doing away with the jungle of forms and armies of enforcers.  The IRS would not need them.

2.  Legalize marijuana. Yeah, yeah, this sounds desperate. It is not. It is merely getting real.

Pot harms health? Well, duh, booze does too. Gambling does too. Smoking tobacco does too.

We consume something north of $115 billion worth of weed. If we legalize it, we can tax it. Taxes would probably come to $25 billion. One organization that studies the question estimates $31 billion revenue. And we would save $11 billion in law enforcement. That is how much it costs us across the country to arrest and prosecute and jail people we catch with marijuana.

Yes, we would miss all the news headlines about the drug busts. We would no longer see the names of neighborhood kids in the police blotter.