EJ Dionne: Deficit Dodge Ball: Will Anyone Admit That Taxes Have to Rise?

[steven johnson]

The necessity of increasing revenues over the next 20 years is the 800 pound gorilla in room. Every administration for the past 20 years has used dubious accounting and unrealistically optimistic economic effects on tax revenues to balance the budget in the future. The future is here. Now what are we going to do?

Thursday, March 26, 2009; Page A21

The debate on the budget is phony, the howling on deficits a charade. Few politicians want to acknowledge that if you really are concerned about long-term deficits, you have to support tax increases.

That's why the most significant moment of President Obama's news conference on Tuesday was not his dodge of a question on AIG but his defense of the least popular tax increase in his budget: limits on the benefits wealthier taxpayers get for their charitable contributions and mortgage payments.

The larger problem is the emptiness of all the howling over the long-term deficits. Nibbling away at bits of Obama's proposed budget will do very little about them. Talk of "entitlement reform" is empty unless we have health-care reform -- and unless we acknowledge that we will never cut Medicare and Social Security enough to close the budget gap. In fact, Social Security is more important than ever, now that the value of so many 401(k)s has plummeted.

The task of those who genuinely care about deficits is to make the world safe for tax increases. Under current conditions, it's a whole lot easier for politicians to talk a lot about deficits, and then just let them grow.

Deficit Dodge Ball