The "TR" Fight Upcoming

Krauthammer lays out the sequencing here, and gets to "TR": Tax Reform.

...The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions of debt and doesn't balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, they say, Ryan never really gets you there from here.

Not so fast, LeftOWackies: he's not done yet.

...the critics miss the point. You can't get there from here without Ryan's plan. It's the essential element. Of course Ryan is not going to propose tax increases. You don't need Republicans for that. That's what Democrats do.

True fact. It is impossible to right the US' fiscal ship without spending cuts. Big ones. Cutting-whole-Departments ones. (Krauthammer doesn't mention that, and I think that's significant.)

Now on to the food-fight part:

Krauthammer says that with Ryan's plan, the annual deficit will be in the area of 1.6% by 2021.

...The critics are right to focus on that gap. But it is bridgeable. And the mechanism for doing so is in plain sight: tax reform.

Real tax reform strips out exclusions, deductions, credits and the innumerable loopholes that have accumulated since the last tax reform of 1986. The Simpson-Bowles commission, for example, identifies $1.1 trillion of such revenue-robbers. In one scenario, it strips them all out and thus is able to lower rates for everyone to three brackets of 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent.

If you're paying attention, you know that the mortgage-interest deduction is already in play. The Realtors and the Banksters are screeching on every outlet they can find.

Natch, they don't mention the reduction in the OVERALL rate--so the question: would you pay 23% with NO deductions, or 39% WITH 'em?