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Why Spending Cuts Won't Balance the Budget

Quick, what tree-hugging, wealth-redistributing, death-paneling liberal just wrote the following:

To control borrowing without ever-rising rates of taxation, Congress will have to curb currently projected spending. But that will not be enough by itself. It is delusional to think the US can get from here to a sustainable fiscal balance with spending cuts alone.
Yet this is exactly what many conservatives do think. Often they cite the “Roadmap for America” released earlier this year by the Republican congressman Paul Ryan. Many see Mr Ryan as the party’s best thinker on fiscal reform (admittedly, not a very exacting distinction). His plan aims to cut taxes, not raise them, and still get public debt down: he does it all with spending cuts. ...
Give Mr Ryan some credit for spelling out his plans in detail so that one can work out what they mean. This alone makes him a rarity among conservatives in Congress. The problem is, once you see what his proposals mean, you know they are politically impossible. ...
The distributional effect of Mr Ryan’s tax plans would be extremely skewed. Much lower capital taxation would drive taxes on the wealthy right down. For Americans of ordinary means, on the other hand, lower tax rates would be outweighed by other changes. The plan replaces the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance with a tax credit--a good idea in principle, but not when packaged like this. Also, the projections are too optimistic. On plausible assumptions, revenues would fall too much, and the deficit would widen.

Why, that would be Atlantic and Financial Times columnist Clive Crook, who is quite a few clicks to my right but is frequently a voice of common sense, as this column suggests.