E.D. Kain's "An Alternative to the Ryan Budget"

Is must reading. So much so, that here is a big chunk of it: (emp in original)

Andrew Sullivan says that Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget is a Very Serious budget and if liberals don’t like it, well what’s the alternative? So just for fun, I hopped over to the New York Times’ budget calculator to try my hand at fixing the impending fiscal nightmare and saving the world from certain financial doom. Here is what I did.

I really didn’t cut any of the small potato stuff like government jobs or salaries. I didn’t reduce subsidies to farms (even though I don’t think that’s a bad idea) or touch any other discretionary spending except defense.

On defense, I reduced spending on nuclear programs, reduced troop levels to pre-Iraq levels, reduced the Navy and Air Force fleets, canceled weapons programs, and reduced the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013.

I ignored malpractice reform and didn’t increase the retirement age one bit. I did reduce the tax break for employer-provided insurance because that’s one of the major hurdles to fixing our broken healthcare system. I didn’t raise the Medicare eligibility age. I didn’t ‘voucherize’ Medicare or turn Medicaid into a slush fund for state governments. I did means-test Social Security, but it wasn’t necessary. You could take it or leave it really.

Then I returned tax rates to the historically low Clinton-era levels. I returned estate, capital gains, and income rates back to the Clinton-era levels. I raised the cap on payroll taxes on incomes above $106,000.

I skipped over the millionaire’s tax (though we certainly could impose one, we don’t need to) and decided to follow some of the advice of the Bowles-Simpson plan by removing loopholes in the tax code. I did not, however, lower rates as they suggested. Rates are low! Removing loopholes makes sense, but we don’t need lower taxes.

Nor did I remove the mortgage deduction or implement a national sales tax (though I think a national sales tax coupled with a millionaire’s tax makes a lot of sense, and would raise a lot of money). Instead, I opted for a carbon tax and a bank tax because I think we should put a price on carbon and on the risks bankers have been taking with our money.

And just like that, I closed up the deficit by 2015 and also by 2030. I didn’t have to fire a single teacher or privatize a single government program to do it either.

Basically, cutting back the military to pre-Bush levels, and reverting back to the Clinton-era tax rates is all you need to do to fix the deficit. There’s some tinkering you can do here and there to make it more sustainable, but that’s all in the margins. A national sales tax would be more recession proof, but we don’t need one. Fixing healthcare would be great, but it’s going to take a lot more than the Republican idea of gutting entitlements and leaving the poor out in the rain to fend for themselves.

Raise some revenue, cut some defense spending, and call it a day.

The rest is just fearmongering and tax cuts for the very, very rich at the expense of middle-class and working Americans. Surely we can do better than this Very Serious budget proposal.

posted by Quiddity at 4/05/2011 11:37:00 AM