I swear that I will support any and all tax increases on the wealthy and oppose any and all top-level tax cuts until every public service in America is completely free of charge and accessible, every public school in America provides the highest quality education in the world, every public hospital in America provides the highest-quality healthcare in the world, every electrical grid in America is sustainable and robust, every water supply in America is sustainable and safe, every bridge and tunnel in America meets the highest safety standards, and every city in America is safe and clean above and beyond the standards of a civilized nation. I further swear to support any and all budget increases and oppose any and all budget cuts on these priorities until the stated objectives are achieved with room to spare.
Why have I called this the "American Tax Pledge"? Quite simply, because you can't seriously call yourself American if you value the private income and idle privilege of an elite minority over achieving these basic expectations for your country and its people. This pledge is the minimum necessary demonstration that a person even considers themselves to be part of this country and acknowledges any obligation whatsoever to their countrymen, because the alternative is the attitude that to be American is a meaningless statement of geography - that our country is nothing more than a power vacuum within which predators and parasites alone feel free while everyone else lives only by the grace of wealthy masters. That is the most egregious betrayal of our Founding principles, to say nothing of our finest hours as a nation.
Moreover, as strong as the above pledge may sound at first glance, on close inspection you will realize it carries no inherent ideological bias. Ubiquitous, high-quality public education does not preclude or inhibit private education, nor does the same level of public healthcare impede private healthcare - and there are certainly no private sector disadvantages to having safe and clean cities, reliable and sustainable water and power supplies, well-maintained roads and transit options, and all the various other elements of an intelligent public sector. Rather, the only intrinsic reason to reject such a pledge would be if one fundamentally sees one's self as being in a zero-sum struggle for supremacy over others, and that cannot fit any remotely workable definition of morality, patriotism, or humanity.
So I say to Mr. Grover Norquist and his fanatic disciples who've pledged the exact opposite of this: Your neurotic, irrational, and irrelevant fixation on the "size" of government has claimed enough victims for a thousand lifetimes, and we are no longer interested in feeding your fantasies with the blood of the neglected, the sweat of a perpetually indentured working class, and the insecurity of a dwindling middle-class you have undermined and preyed upon with a malevolence equal to or beyond any foreign enemy. Any American who is indeed American can agree that a public service should in fact be public and a service, that education and healthcare are not to be hoarded as privileges of the few, and that everyone deserves to live in a clean, safe, and opportunity-enriching community. And anyone with eyes can see that coddling the wealthy beyond all reason and decency has failed to provide any of this, and in fact has done the opposite.
So regardless of what Party your elected representatives on every level of government belong to, present them with the American Tax Pledge and ask them to support it. Few will, at first, but this is how change begins: With the decision of a single citizen to no longer tolerate the intolerable, and to speak Common Sense to their countrymen and their government.