TenuredVulture wrote:Addressing the budget issue should be quite simple. The difficult step is to get people to recognize that various tax deductions (for instance the fact that health insurance provided by an employer amounts to tax free income or the mortgage interest deduction) are from an economic and fiscal perspective, expenditures. So, by cutting those things, you are in fact shrinking government and cutting spending, not raising taxes. This is of course not easy, since there are legions of interest groups that will try to convince you otherwise. But they are liars.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mon ... not-alone/
So, that's one approach. Maybe you combine it with an overall lowering of rates. Or maybe you just do a little at the edges--maybe you don't touch the mortgage deduction or health insurance now, but go after other deductions, particularly on the corporate side. But you don't make it revenue neutral, you make it revenue positive, because it's really a spending cut.
But the real deal is to trade off sequester spending for entitlement reforms. And you have to reform those entitlements, especially medicare. People are going to like it. But you get people to come around on it through a judicious use of pork and current spending. Use the short termism of most political actors to your advantage.
Someone recently pointed out that the two parties are now tied to positions that have them crosswise with their current core supporters. The Democrats, traditional defenders of Medicare and Social Security, are unable to provide for the younger and more diverse constituents that have made them winners at the presidential level. The Republicans, who have long argued for entitlement reform, find themselves arguing for a policy change that would disadvantage the old whites who enable their House majority.
I get that the Republicans are arguing for changes that wouldn't impact current recipients, but that's a subtlety low-information voters might not grasp.
