the choice: Increase revenues (end Bush tax cuts) or Massive Cuts to Soc Sec, Medicare, etc....

[amborin]

This article is from January 2010, but its points are still valid and show clearly why the deficit deal is so dangerous and why the Bush tax cuts must expire. Of course, any "deficit" discussion only props up a phony issue; if we had progressive taxation, full employment, slashed our obscene military spending, etc....the issue would evaporate.

Center for American Progress:

How to Spot A Deficit Peacock

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1. They never mention revenues.

...... in 2009..... the size of the revenue decline was four times larger than all of the new spending initiatives started since President Obama took office. Tax revenues in 2009 were at their lowest levels since 1950. When revenues decline by 17 percent, as they did last year, deficits skyrocket.

Increasing revenues is going to have to be part of the solution for meeting the fiscal challenge. Any suggestion that we can solve this problem solely by cutting spending reveals an utter misunderstanding or ignorance of the budget numbers.
Balancing the budget without raising any additional revenue 10 years from now would require cutting every program in the entire budget by more than 25 percent, including all defense spending, Social Security and Medicare benefits, air-traffic-control funding, veterans’ benefits, aid to schools, job training programs, agriculture subsidies, highway maintenance, and everything else.

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So the next time you hear someone railing against the size of the deficit and saying that all we need to do is cut government spending, that means he is either in favor of massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and everything else, or else he is just posturing. Being sincerely in favor of balancing the budget necessitates being in favor of raising more revenue.
...........Those who claim that we could get the budget back to sustainability if we only cut out earmarks, or say that the solution is to simply freeze discretionary spending, are just peddling fiscal snake oil.

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Freezing discretionary spending, the spending that Congress reappropriates every year, at current levels will similarly yield only very small budgetary savings. The federal government spent a bit more than $625 billion on non-defense discretionary programs in 2009. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, in five years, the federal government will spend about $660 billion on the same programs. Freezing non-defense discretionary spending at current levels would therefore only produce a total savings of $35 billion in 2015......a spending freeze would accomplish extremely little in the way of measurable deficit reduction.

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......it should be obvious, but you might be surprised by the number of people who now claim to be concerned about our fiscal future .......
....... who are still supporting new deficit-exploding policies while simultaneously professing grave unease over our fiscal path. For example, there are 34 senators who have co-sponsored recent legislation offered by Senators Conrad and Gregg to “create a bipartisan fiscal task force to address the nation’s long-term budget crisis.” Strange, then, that 25 of them recently voted to slash the estate tax so that the 3,000 richest families in the country can get another tax cut, a policy which would increase the deficit by $100 billion over 10 years. When someone supports a deficit commission one day and votes to use another $100 billion of red ink on tax cuts for the rich the next, it is perhaps an indication that his or her commitment to real deficit reduction leaves something to be desired.

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http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/01/deficit_peacock.html