Here is the actual report (PDF). I have to say, its not as horrible as I thought it would be; I was figuring it would be nothing more than a plea for higher taxes and only modest cuts. As it turns out, its a plea for some higher taxes and semi-big cuts in spending – and it has its share of completely impossible things, such as an end to mortgage interest deduction. You’ll never get that past the American taxpayer.
The proposals don’t put in place a balanced budget until 2037 – 27 years from now. I don’t think we’ll be able to get away with that. Long before then, I think the world will demand much more fiscal sanity from us…plus, when you put things that far out, its easy for Congresscritters to cease being mindful of the problem and start putting more spending back in. Just a little here and a little there, to begin with. Balancing the budget can’t be something to happen when my grand-daughter is 32…it must be an axe to fall on the head of Big Government before she gets to middle school. The budget should be balanced by 2015.
Our budget crisis is acute (the report does clearly state that, and that is a good service, in and of itself), but the report still tries to soften the blow. By so doing, however, they’ve set their own plan up for failure. A century of fiscal idiocy has now to be paid for – there is, as the report notes, no painless way out of it. More to the point, there is no way out of it which won’t be very, very painful. The authors of the report, however, still live in enough of the Big Government dream world that they imagine we can get out of this without agony. Might as well bite the bullet and have done – if we balance the budget by 2015, we’ll have one or two really bad years, but then ever better years thereafter. The proposals here are basically a means of spreading out the pain so that things never get horribly bad, but also never get terribly good.
All in all, it is the plan of the Ruling Class to save itself from its fiscal irresponsibility. We should use it as a basis for discussion rather than a blue print for action. As this was set up by Obama and the Democrats, we can hang on to the good bits and dare them to defy their own creation – meanwhile and all the while trying to inject even stronger and deeper reforms to fundamentally end the era of Big Government.
UPDATE: Bryan Preston over at Pajamas Media dissects the plan.
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