David Leonhardt points to a truth which is somewhat startling given all the Republican sturm und drang: keep Congress from any further action and the deficit will decrease significantly. "So keep your eye on Jan. 1, 2013," he writes. "The best hope for a solution may be the possibility that the two parties can’t agree to a solution."
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.
Of course, both parties favor the permanent extension of most of those tax cuts — the ones applying to income below $250,000. Both parties also oppose big cuts to the military, Social Security and Medicare, at least in the short term. Unfortunately, the deficit is likely to remain frighteningly large over the next decade without either cuts to those programs or tax increases.
Obama has been playing games during all of the recent negotiations -- "dancing around," as Leonhardt puts it. Both sides of the issue behave as though tax increases are technalities. However, tax increases "In reality," he writes, " finding a way to raise taxes may well be the central political problem facing the United States."
This is where the Bush tax cuts come in. They have created a way for inertia to be fiscally responsible. ...If Mr. Obama wins re-election, he could simply refuse to sign any budget-busting tax cut for the rich — who, after all, have received much larger pretax raises than any other income group in recent years and have also had their tax rates fall more. Republicans, for their part, could again refuse to pass any partial extension.
This would constitute a kind of shut-down further useless negotiations between Congress and White House. That way we'd see -- by 2018 -- a 75% reduction in the deficit problem.
The rest could come from spending cuts, both for social programs and the military.
Over the longer term — 20 years — letting all of the Bush cuts lapse would close only about 40 percent of the budget gap. But 40 percent is a great start. No one is seriously suggesting that all deficit reduction should come from higher taxes. Much of it will have to come from slowing the growth rate of medical spending, which is the main cause of the long-term deficit.
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We are a nation of sacred cows. I'm talking about two aspects of America. One is our personal tonnage and the other is our indignation when anyone looks askance at someone who is obese. If feeling disgust and annoyance around people who are seriously obese is unfair, well, count me as one of the unfair. One reason has to do with feeling uncomfortable and frustrated in the company of people who are both self-destructive and heedless. The other has to do with those whose addictions add to everyone's difficulties. They cost us all a lot. The losses are measurable exactly as war's costs are measurable -- in young lives and a nation's treasure.
Oddly, it's a food guy who is taking this issue on. Mark Bittman has been for years a great food writer, cooking experimenter, and recipe source. Now he's working for the New York Times as a general op-ed writer on a variety of topics. Today he takes on obesity.
For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.
But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.
This isn’t just me talking. In a recent issue of the magazine Circulation, the American Heart Association editorial board stated flatly that costs in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death here and in much of the rest of the world — will triple by 2030, to more than $800 billion annually. Throw in about $276 billion of what they call “real indirect costs,” like productivity, and you have over a trillion. Enough over, in fact, to make $38 billion in budget cuts seem like a rounding error.
Why is it we're willing to throw stones at the Pentagon and its hawk supporters for their conspiracy to relieve America of its money as well as its young and healthy while we edge away from recognizing that obese people and their enablers are costing us in exactly the same way?
At the very least, Bittman reminds us that our behaviors as individuals -- not just the behaviors of politicians -- determine a community's and a whole nation's future. Are we net pluses or net minuses for our country's physical and fiscal health?
