The Unbalanaced Deficit Debate

LA Times:

In any environment of serious debate, Simpson-Bowles would be dismissed out of hand. Praised for its sober bipartisan spirit, it's a compendium of flatulent platitudes ("We all have a patriotic duty to make America better off tomorrow than it is today"), vague prescriptions ("cut all excess spending" and "avoid excessive taxation" — as if reaching broad agreement on the meaning of "excessive" is a snap), and the occasional nostrum that earns a "not" on the gonna-happen scale (strip down the mortgage-interest deduction). According to some estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the plan's sample cuts in the tax deductions wouldn't replace the revenue lost to its proposed reductions in marginal tax rates.
"The Moment of Truth" bills itself as a roadmap to deficit reduction, but it's really a guide to cutting services and benefits for the working and middle class while raising revenues only modestly, if that. (The authors claim to raise tax revenues across the board, but the only way to do that while cutting marginal tax rates, as they propose, is to eliminate virtually all tax deductions, which manifestly is far more difficult than cutting rates.)
The authors give the game away through the report's internal contradictions. They observe that at 15% of gross domestic product, tax revenues today are at "the lowest level since 1950." Yet they thunder that the key to cutting the deficit is to "sharply reduce tax rates" while warning that "revenue cannot constantly increase as a share of the economy." How's that again?
Every serious analyst of the federal budget knows that healthcare costs, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid, will account for virtually 100% of federal spending increases going forward. The CBO projects that they will rise over the next two decades to as much as 10.4% of gross domestic product from 5.6% now.
Over that time, about half of the increase will come from the aging of the population, and the rest in growth of spending per individual. Not much can be done about aging, and Simpson and Bowles have little to offer about how to rein in the per-capita spending other than to transfer the costs off the federal budget by sticking it to others, including the premium-paying elderly.

What gets me is that all the politicians talk about "tax reform," which only means that deductions which benefit both the middle class and rich folks go away, while rich folks get lower tax rates.  Fuck that.  Limit the deductions to a certain amount which still benefits the middle class, get rid of the preferred treatment of dividends, and add tax brackets at higher incomes, like $750,000, $1.5 million and $5 million.  All rich folks do is bitch about taxes, but there have only been 3 years in the last 75 where they paid lower overall rates, and taxes got raised then because the deficit was too big.  These so-called job creators are really just selfish assholes who claim taxes prevent them from investing in business, but since taxes are historically low and they aren't creating jobs, they are just liars.  At some point, middle class folks are going to realize who is really fucking them, and it won't be a good thing for rich folks when they do.