By Steve Hynd
In case you haven't seen it, the NYT has a neat little interactive puzzle-game where you can set out your own plan for fixing the budget and plugging the deficit. Fun, interesting and informative. Kudos, NYT, this kind of thing is exactly what the internet is for.
Here's mine. I fixed the budget with 62% tax increases (for the rich, natch) and 32% spending cuts (mostly from the military budget), but without raising the age for either social security or medicare eligibility and without cutting benefits for those who need them most.
Post a link to your plan in comments.
P.S. The NYT's David Leonhardt has a nice post relating how the various options in the deficit puzzle were arrived at.
Update: The other side of the coin, from Dean Baker at FDL:
We have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up work altogether. This is a real crisis. Furthermore, it is worth noting that these people are largely suffering as a result of the incompetence of the budget balancers. (The budget balancers were the same people who dominated economic debate in the years before the crash and could did not see the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy and gave us the huge deficits that now have them so obsessed.)
Obviously it is politically popular in Washington to be obssesed by the deficit, but we are supposed to have an independent press in this country. It is utterly loony to be focused on the projected deficit in 2030, when we have tens of millions of people who are seeing their lives ruined today by the downturn. This is like debating the colors to paint the classrooms when the school is on fire with the students still inside. Given economic reality, it would make far more sense to use the effort devoted to construct an elaborate game like this to designing a route toward restoring full employment.
Some days I'm slower than I ought to be. I should have spotted the bait-and-switch myself. Sorry.
Here's mine
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