As the USA edges closer to the “fiscal cliff”, an automatic mechanism that eliminates Bush tax cuts and mandates across-the-board spending cuts under the Budget Control Act of 2011, The New York Times posted a Tool on its website to enable you to fix the budget by determining what to cut and what taxes to increase.
I ran several different scenarios and it became clear that taxing the rich was not going to solve the problem. In fact it won’t even hardly put a dent in the budget deficit. The real work is trying to figure out which entitlement programs to rework such as raising the age for Social Security or enacting means testing. Obviously, with the message that we got from this last election, tinkering with any entitlement programs may be political suicide. However, the New York Times tool will help you to understand that there really is no way to tax our way out of this budget deficit and debt.
I would encourage both Blue and Red leaning voters to take a look at this tool and then tell me what you would do. In the end, I suspect that the only way out of this is to hope that the economy grows at such a rapid rate that we can grow our way out of this mess as we have in the past. However, with Obamacare and looming new taxes on job creators killing jobs and no one willing to touch entitlements, I just don’t see the economy heating up enough to grow our way out of this mess.
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