The
NYT's David Leonhardt
continues to make the case started by
Ezra for gridlock, for doing nothing about the budget and letting the Bush tax cuts expire.
A trick question: If Congress takes no action in coming years, what will happen to the budget deficit?
It will shrink—and shrink a lot. This simple fact may offer the best hope for deficit reduction.
As federal law currently stands, some significant tax increases are set to take effect in coming years. The most important is the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012....
As countries become richer, their citizens tend to want more public services, be it a strong military or a decent safety net in retirement. This country is no exception. Yet our political culture is an exception. It has made most tax increases, even to pay for benefits people want, unthinkable.
This is where the Bush tax cuts come in. They have created a way for inertia to be fiscally responsible....
To be clear, the end of the Bush cuts is not the ideal way to raise taxes. A better approach would be to close some tax loopholes while possibly even reducing rates. The tax code would then become simpler. Businesses and households would have to waste less effort trying to qualify for tax breaks.
He makes a very strong case for inertia, at least in the short term. Given the unprecedented extremism, not to mention the degree of batshit insanity, of the current crop of GOP House members, doing nothing is extremely attractive. Undoing the damage they could wreak in the next two years will take decades, so better to not let them touch anything. Of course, that's banking on the promise that some day political sanity will return to the nation, and we'll have a responsible Congress that's interested in governing instead of destroying government. But that slim reed of hope is about all we've got at the moment.