Unserious People
OK, let’s say goodbye to the deficit commission. If you’re sincerely worried about the US fiscal future — and there’s good reason to be — you don’t propose a plan that involves large cuts in income taxes. Even if those cuts are offset by supposed elimination of tax breaks elsewhere, balancing the budget is hard enough without giving out a lot of goodies — goodies that fairly obviously, even without having the details, would go largely to the very affluent.
I mean, what’s this about? There is no — zero — evidence that income taxes at current rates are an important drag on growth.
Oh, and they’re talking about raising the retirement age, because people live longer — except that the people who really depend on Social Security, those in the bottom half of the distribution, aren’t living much longer. So you’re going to tell janitors to work until they’re 70 because lawyers are living longer than ever.
Still, I guess this is what it takes to get compromise, if by compromise you mean something the center-right and the hard right can agree on.
[Let's stop already with the right's obsessive and fetishistic calling for tax cuts, an orgy of selfishness masquerading as supply-side economic theory. Everyone wants to pay fewer taxes, but concern for our deficits must start with repaying our debts. Just giving ourselves more money doesn't fix the problem we're supposedly so concerned with.]
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