Utopian Dreams For All

We’ve got to cut spending much more dramatically. Yes, that includes finding ways to cut Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and other bloated programs that help the nation’s most poor. And, yes, that means cutting our military spending, too.
Sorry to say it, but we also have to raise taxes. While I’m all for smaller government and lower taxes – we simply can’t dig out of this hole with spending cuts alone. We bear the burden of the generations of low taxes and high spending before us.
If it were up to me (it’s clearly not), I’d favor a 2:1 ratio. We’d cut twice the spending (as I believe our spending is our core problem) than we would raise taxes – but we’d still do both.
http://manvsdebt.com/what-can-we-learn-from-the-debt-ceiling-debacle/

There's no way to restore fiscal sanity without, as the author writes, addressing the entitlement programs.  They are, and medicare in particular is, over fifty percent of the unfunded future obligation.  Unless and until that is dealt with, there's almost no sense in fighting over the rest of it. 

By contrast, SS could be fixed with a few nips and tucks - raise the age hurdles, means testing, and of course, decreased payments.  To a degree, this is all being done via dilution of the dollar (That sort of funny money game doesn't work at all with medicare).  Social security going forward will be interesting to track across the suck factor - it's already such a marginal program that they have to force people to participate via gun point.  How much worse will it get?

As for taxes - we don't need higher tax rates, unless that produces higher tax revenue.  Precision in language as regards taxes is everything.  To assume that raising tax rates will increase the number of dollars flowing into the treasury is quite uninformed as it pretends that human behavior is not affected by incentives.

I also think the tax increase talk is deceptive per se.  We don't suffer from a lack of taxation, we suffer from uncontrolled spending.  You can do nothing about the later by manipulating the former.  Were the politicians to establish a spending limit, raising tax revenues might be productive.  However, since they clearly spend until they cannot spend more, I see no reason to believe, in fact I think it is deluded to believe, that having raised taxes, politicians won't find another reason why they have to spend it.

The means by which we tax ourselves could be changed such that we don't waste so much human capital maneuvering around the tax system (personal and business), and we don't distort the process of choosing how to invest by tax perversions.  My vote is a massive simplification with a four year phase out of deductions, and elimination of taxation on businesses.  The resulting explosion in business activity, and elimination of billions of dollars of pure waste that is currently part and parcel of tax planning and compliance, will result in hiring and productive employment of many people.

Lastly, as addressed here, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576510660976229354.html without a growth aspect in the "plan" for managing the nation's unsustainable spending, I'm not sure there's a solution.  You can take what politicians know about stimulating growth and stuff that into a tissue box.  The only proven strategy is liberty, and that is anathema to the political animal since it renders him/her insignificant.  The pretense of significance is the life blood of the political animal.  Logically, the chance that any political body will increase liberty, "except at gunpoint" - a term I mean figuratively - is poor at best.

So all we're asking politicians to do is to: 

*revamp medicare to a system that works, does not distort medical pricing to the absurd degree it is being done now (complete disconnect between value, cost and price in the current socialized/capitalized bastard child of our "health care system").  In short, they must unlegislate all of the value distorting things they've created since WWII

*set spending limits on themselves, increase liberty, and decrease their significance in our lives

*make un-political choices about taxes that will increase the number of people who pay, and drastically simplify the ways by which tax obligations are determined.  They must make choices that eliminate waste, choices that stimulate the motive to conduct business, choices that eliminate the significance of politicians in the tax process, and choices that don't allow politicians to say they "stuck it to the other side, which is why you should vote for me."  I'm not holding my breath on this ....

*make choices which might marginally increase tax revenues, but will still essentially put the burden on the political class to cease and desist buying favor by spending tax payer money

Short of a constitutional convention, I don't see how any of the above could be accomplished.  Thus most of the discussion will be more blathering about nothing.  The result:  crisis, which is usually the justification for an elevation of tyranny.

Barry writes about goodness here:  http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

Barry's brain is immense and powerful, and I don't know how he sees the rubber meeting the road, but from my perspective, goodness comes from humans doing what they always will, serving their own self interest, through cooperation vice coercion.  Absent the power of the state, the ability of any group to coerce another is extremely limited. 

Government's primary job, day and night, should be to defend your rights against others, and others against you.  With government focused on that job, there's little for the "special interests" to fight over, and no real way to get ahead except by being the best at giving folks what they want in the market at a price they want to pay - and doing so better than all competitors (Wal Mart, Standard Oil, etc).

In short, I get simplistic along these lines:  either you believe in the power of coercion and think we just need "better politicians" doing "smarter" legislation to make it all better to create a just and fair utopia; or you think no one is smart enough to coordinate things as complex as economies and health care transactions and all the other immensity of our world, and so it's best to let people work it out cooperatively, warts and all.

As for me, I think the moment two people agree on mutually acceptable terms is "goodness."  Informed and wise mutual agreement is more goodness, and foolish mutual agreement is less goodness.  Both of those outcomes trump coercion by a third part.  This is known colloquially as "freedom."  Perhaps you have heard this term. 

The solution from my perspective is to stuff the Federal Government back into a box from which its powers are to provide for our common defense, and to ensure the States don't treat us any worse than the Federal Government is allowed to.