The New York Times has a fun (though probably unavoidably simplistic) tool that lets you choose your budget priorities and try to balance the budget.
Tom Levenson points out that this tool highlights how much the budget balancing priorities of the Blue Dogs seem to prioritize wealth transfer from the middle class to the wealthy.
My approach shows that returning tax rates and military levels to Clinton-era levels goes a long way toward balancing the budget.
Pshah! You had to raise taxes? Socialist.
I took all the budget cuts offered. I did increase taxes by having the favorable tax treatment of employers’ contributions to employees’ health insurance phase out gradually. No other tax increases.
I vastly outperformed you, Doug. By 2015, I eliminated a projected deficit of $418 billion and changed it into a surplus of $41 billion. By 2030, I eliminated a projected deficit of $1,355 billion and changed it to a surplus of $329 billion.
These really are relatively small changes: cutting government pay by 5 percent, reducing the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2013, ending a few agencies, cutting aid to state governments by a small percent, etc.
And the other obvious benefit of cutting vs. raising taxes is that you don’t tank the economy when you do so. Making small cuts and allowing the economy to grow our way out of the deficit is exactly how the Republican Congress created the surplus in the ’90s.
BTW, the choices that do the most to reduce the deficit in the Times app are capping Medicare growth after 2013 (I love the way that they don’t explain how you would do that), reducing the tax break for health insurance, raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, changing the inflation index for Social Security, reducing Social Security payments to people on high incomes, raising the age of Medicare eligibility to 70, and reducing troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Eliminating the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy does not even come close to the savings of any one of these spending cuts.