Follow-up to Mark

There is a good follow-up to Mark's post yesterday here.

The central issue is that the Ryan budget only works if you can find a huge number of tax expenditures to remove and/or enormous cuts in the budget.  Removing all taxes on capital gain plus dropping the rate on the top tax bracket is an extreme change in the historical structure of the United States government.

Now, I have no trouble with people arguing for their ideas as to what is an ideal form and structure of government.  But I do think that both sides should be really transparent.  When I argue for single player health care, I try to be enormously transparent with how dramatically it would impact current providers (and how it would change the relation between patients and physicians).  I also suggest what I think might work as ways to mitigate these issues.

But the idea that dropping the top tax rates and setting the capital gains tax rate to zero would increases taxes paid by the ultra-rich only makes sense if there is a tax expenditure that can be targeted.  What that tax expenditure is should be the center of the debate now.

But it sounds like this has got to be one heck of an interesting plan.