Reform of the health system is essential to fiscal viability, and you have some good ideas there (though I would want to see some support for you 5/50 claim). Is a national choice, I suppose, but I don’t see Americans going that far in spending cuts. Too many treasured benefits.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection could keep our clean state just as clean without any help from the EPA.

We would continue to be the worlds 1st military power at 1/2 the current spend.

Medicare and Medicaid could be combined to cover every American with smart, compassionate, preventative and palliative care at half the current federal/state health spend. It would dramatically limit access to the health system for the 5% of people who drive 50% of the cost, but radically improve the access to care for the vast majority of working people. Under this system there would be a huge resource shift from care for older Americans towards younger Americans, (the workers and their children.)

My wife and I are blessed with 3 living parents and two living children. Any sane outcome based system would prioritize care (more than our present system currently does) towards citizens who have many more years of productive life ahead of them. I don’t view that as in-compassionate just realistic.

Our budget is 1/3 out of balance, ball park 1,000,000,000,000 annually. The entire “cliff” represents less than 20% of the annual delta. Eventually (by choice or not by choice) we’re going to go over it 5 times. It won’t be fun and the changes will adversely affect nearly all of us. It will be MUCH easier to swallow if we start the process now than if we wait until our currency and yield curve start making choices for us.

You cannot realistically raise taxes by enough to close the present budget gap. (Maybe you could, but I don’t think America wants to go that direction. Would be an awful lot like Western Europe.) Nor can you conceivably cut spending by enough to do the job that way.

If I were in charge, I would put a definite plan in place for reducing spending some $300B/year (including cuts to Social Security, limits, copays, and increased means-testing on Medicare, increased pension contributions for government workers and delayed retirement age, as well as reductions in discretionary spending). I would aim to increase taxes by a similar amount, especially on the upper middle class (anybody making $100k+ ought to be able to afford a little more, whether they like it or not). Fewer specialized tax credits.

Or you could just go with Bowles-Simpson. Wasn’t a bad plan.

Modest tax increases, especially on the wealthier segments, should not have a sharp impact on the economy. Spending cuts, and tax increases on the lower-middle-class would be felt more immediately. So phase it in to cushion the impact over a couple years.

And yes, we haven’t fired nearly enough politicians for cutting taxes and increasing spending. We need to do much more of that.

The practical answer is that lots of politicians will get “fired” for raising taxes, or cutting spending, relatively few so far have been “fired” for running a deficit.

The social deadlock arises from at least:

a. Conflicts among various groups in a given society. (Given the size of the US or the size of Europe, such conflicts are almost assured.)

b. Conflicts between wishes and fiscal reality. (Low taxes and high spending are widely loved, too bad it doesn’t actually work.)

c. Conflicts between wishes and theories and human reality. (High spending with all the taxes applied to somebody else also seems popular, but it invariably either fails to make revenue or strangles the goose.)

The first set (a) is bound up in issues of religion, freedom, civilization, ways of live.

The second and third (b and c) are about the limits of government and taxation and redistribution, both near-term hard and longer term equally hard.