Fiscal sanity

Slate makes an admirable attempt to bring the debate on the budget back down to Earth with its "Do-Nothing" budget fix. Noting that the CBO's baseline projection predicts that if present trends simply continue, the budget deficit will be gone by 2019, Annie Lowrey explains:

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 Second, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's health care law, would proceed without getting repealed or defunded.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.

She agrees that we don't necessarily want all of these things to happen, and they don't have to, as long as Congress makes sure it pays for whatever changes it makes. But the point is that there is no massive, dramatic plan necessary to fix the deficit - just some tinkering will do.

That is because, by and large, the hard work of fixing the fat part of the budget has already happened—through health care reform. The Social Security crisis you sometimes hear about is essentially a myth. The trust fund will run out in 2037, "at which point tax income would be sufficient to pay about 75 percent of scheduled benefits through 2084." Full Social Security solvency would require only about 0.7 percent of GDP, which you can get to by exposing income above $107,000 to the payroll tax. There is no debt crisis, either, as long as the U.S.'s lenders remain confident in the country. The crisis lies in spiraling health care costs. The Obama health care reform bill might not work, but it does contain programs that could turn the tide over time. The big wheels of deficit reduction are already turning—and it might be better for Congress to step back, stick to pay-as-you-go, and let them turn.

See? There is an alternative.