It's so EZ to save the country

The NY Times set out a challenge: YOU fix the Budget! So I tried and it was easy. You can see my plan from this link.

I (more than) balanced the budget in 2015 and 2030 with 90% coming from spending cuts and 10% from new revenues.

I left the Bush tax rates in place. I didn't get rid our our current tax breaks for mortgages and health insurance. I didn't put on a national sales tax.

I did put on a carbon tax and some type of estate tax. I raised the social security retirement age one year to 68, and I capped medicare growth at GDP growth +1% point starting in 2013.

The rest was just straight up, old fashioned spending cuts.

I would put the chances of anything within two standard deviations of my proposal getting through our political system at right around 2 or 3 percent tops.

But the bottom line is that we are not in budget trouble because of any fundamental structural economic or demographic problems. We are in trouble because our politics are disfunctional.