In a previos post, I said, "I support lower taxes, but I support a balanced budget even more. If there is something we need bad enough that we require the government to provide, it's valuable enough to pay for."

I think the best way to handle our long term debt load is to cut spending we don't value enough to pay for. This would be an epic congressional battle, but we can do it. First we cut the pork and obvious waste. Then we cut the least popular and least useful items on the budget. Whatever is left, we can make across the board cuts in the discretionary budget. Before making any cuts, we have a total budget deficit of about a quarter trillion dollars. We have discretionary budget of about a $1 trillion. If we cut the entire discretionary budget by 25%, we would balance the budget.

That said, to balance the budget, I think it likely that some sort of compromise would have to be reached between the political parties. We would likely have to raise taxes. The most obvious method would be to let the Bush tax cuts expire. We could also raise taxes in some other third manner.

I think narrowing the tax brackets so the taxpayer gets to the next higher marginal rate sooner is the best way to do this.

I also think it is worth raising the taxes on everyone (including the poor) by some token amount - 1% or less. My reasoning isn't that I hate the poor, or that I think those few dollars would make a difference. My reasoning is that the poor are being incentivized to ignore the political process. The poor would be more involved if a few of their ducats were going to the treasury. And if the poor were more involved, they would likely be able to influence other areas that are important to them (worker training for instance).

Such steps would fix the budget deficit. We can do it, we just have to decide to do it.


That still leaves fixing social security and other non-discretionary sinkholes... but I think I'll leave that for another time.