Raising taxes on the rich will not do it. There aren’t enough rich people to generate the tens of trillions of dollars required to pay for Medicare, let alone all the other programs. Democrats, thus, face a fundamental choice. They can either reverse President Obama’s no-new-middle-class-taxes pledge, or they can learn to live with Paul Ryan’s version of government. Until they find a way to pay for the programs they support, they will not be serious players in this game. They will have no credible plans and will be in an angry but permanent retreat.

No, if you want to get the budget under control without meaningfully cutting into entitlements, you’re going to need to hike taxes substantially on the middle class. I’m waiting for the first politician to say this out loud.

Central planning of large economies is a bad policy. When the central planners get it wrong, it compounds the problem.

I think this does tell us something about long-term political resistance to higher taxes–I think it will be much higher than Democrats are expecting. But we already know that long-term resistance to the alternatives–deep cuts to entitlements–is also pretty formidable. That is the context in which future effective tax rates are going to be set.

I was pleasantly shocked by the Republican budget blueprint to cut spending, lower taxes, and attack some of the fundamental problems of entitlement programs such as Medicare. This is the most significant proposal since the Contract For America during the Clinton years. Everyone talks but does nothing about the problem. Paul Ryan’s report touches that “third rail” of politics: entitlement programs. Whether the program is successful or not, whether it feasible or not, is not as important as the message the Republicans are sending about their willingness to take on this supremely important issue. That takes political courage, a rare thing.

Remember that what everybody wants for themselves is unlimited access to medical services without having to pay for them.

Any effort to look at the performance of the TARP in isolation is pure three card monte, and accepting that framing plays into the Administration’s hands. You can’t look at its “success” of a program when its results are dependent on other operations, such as continued regulatory forbearance (aka extend and pretend), the Fed’s super low interest rates (a massive tax on savers), the continuing use of Fannie and Freddie to prop up the housing market, the train wreck hitting state and municipal budgets (the collapse in their revenues is a result of devoting fiscal firepower to the banks rather than the real economy; the experience of other severe banking crisis suggests that a short term fall in economic activity was inescapable, but less bank-coddling approaches would have led to a bona fide recovery). If someone was flattened in a car wreck, taken to a hospital, put on life support, and then subjected to all sorts of operations and medical procedures, how would you judge the result? If the doctor told you, “His broken legs have healed, the internal bleeding has stopped, we are no longer giving him IVs” would you consider any of that germane if he was brain dead and still hospitalized, with no immediate prospect of functioning independently?