Annie Lowrey has a (mostly) modest proposal on the deficit. Do nothing:
So how does doing nothing actually return the budget to health? The answer is that doing nothing allows all kinds of fiscal changes that politicians generally abhor to take effect automatically. First, doing nothing means the Bush tax cuts would expire, as scheduled, at the end of next year. That would cause a moderately progressive tax hike, and one that hits most families, including the middle class. The top marginal rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, and some tax benefits for investment income would disappear. Additionally, a patch to keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million or so families would end. Second, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's health care law, would proceed without getting repealed or defunded. The CBO believes that the plan would bend health care's cost curve downward, wrestling the rate of health care inflation back toward the general rate of inflation. Third, doing nothing would mean that Medicare starts paying doctors low, low rates. Congress would not pass anymore of the regular "doc fixes" that keep reimbursements high. Nothing else happens. Almost magically, everything evens out.
These are the CBO's baseline projections. But, of course, Congress is not likely to let the Bush tax cuts fully expire, or slash doctors' payments. So the CBO also prepares an "alternative fiscal scenario" that looks more like the path we expect Congress to take. It's the alternative scenario that has the horror-show deficits. But Congress doesn't have to act. It just has to do nothing. Or when it does do something, it has to pay for it.
This begs the question: Why are we having a deficit discussion in such apocalyptic tones? Why all the plans and commissions, the stirring invocations to shared sacrifice, the desperate sense of alarm, the demands that spending, particularly on programs that benefit the least financially secure, must be curtailed?
Because much of the deficit panic is not actually about cutting the deficit. It's about furthering a conservative ideological goal to shrink government -- and indeed, Rep. Paul Ryan's plan does much more government cutting than deficit cutting. If we do nothing, or rather, if Congress and the president just act with a modicum of responsibility when the time comes, there is no deficit problem. But, conservatives, following the advice of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, don't want to let a good crisis -- or a majority for that matter -- go to waste. Of course, when Emanuel said that, there was an actual, immediate crisis, and not a pretend one.
