One shot on taxes: Don’t blow it, Democrats

There are now two sides in the American tax debate: the Republican Party, which refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes, and the Democratic Party, which . . . refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes.

Let's start here: We cannot fund anything close to the government's commitments if we don't raise taxes, or if we let only the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000 expire. And that's true even if we make deep cuts across all categories of federal spending.

In the past year, there have been two major attempts to develop a bipartisan deficit-reduction package: one by the president's fiscal commission, led by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, and one by the Bipartisan Policy Center's commission, led by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici. Rivlin, the first director of the Congressional Budget Office and one of the most respected fiscal hawks in Washington, had a particularly good vantage point on the two processes: She co-chaired one commission and served on the other. And she says Republicans and Democrats on both panels came to the same realization.

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Lori Montgomery 03 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=82dd99adc3e489791123321e5b962766
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