Not Just Inefficiencies

My old friend - and uber-wonk - Reihan Salam says the Dish isn't providing the full story about his fiscal proposals. He writes in to elaborate:

I explicitly acknowledge that tax increases might be necessary. I've also explicitly said that I favor the expiration of the Bush tax cuts so that we could replace the current tax code with one modeled on the Growth and Investment Tax Plan devised by the Tax Reform Panel.

For example, I'm all for eliminating tax expenditures, which many will interpret as a tax increase. And I imagine we can save a lot. Competitive Medicare pricing alone will save $500B over a decade. I write more on that general subject here. The mortgage interest tax deduction alone costs ~$637B over five years. As you can see, these numbers start to add up.

If we also transition Medicare to a premium support model, as I think we should, we can tackle the fiscal imbalance without raising marginal tax rates.

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