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The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — which desperately needs a more user-friendly name, by the way — says that our long-term federal deficits are unsustainable. In order to get them to sustainable levels we need a combination of tax increases and spending cuts equal to about 4.9% of GDP. Here’s a start:

If policymakers were to allow all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire as scheduled at the end of 2010 — or fully offset the cost of extending those tax cuts they choose to extend — this alone would shrink the fiscal gap by almost two-fifths, from 4.9 percent of GDP to 3.0 percent.

Sounds good. Except that this would take us back to the fiscal hellscape of the late Clinton era, and who wants that?

The CBPP report is pretty discouraging, but the really discouraging thing about it is this: “Policymakers should also expect to return to long-term deficit reduction multiple times over coming decades; the problem is far too large to address in a single legislative package.” Strictly speaking, this is true: you wouldn’t want to literally do this in a single piece of legislation. But if we were even close to having a sane political class in this country, it wouldn’t be that hard to hit this target: (1) Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Nobody was overtaxed in the 90s. (2) Do a conventional fix for Social Security. This would be good for another 1% or so. (3) Get serious about reining in Medicare costs. Squeezing another 1% via Medicare changes wouldn’t be that difficult if both parties were willing to treat it as a real problem instead of a chance for demagoguery. (4) Add in a modest assortment of spending cuts (smaller military, unprivatized student loan, reduced ag subsidies) and revenue increases (estate taxes, carbon taxes, financial transaction taxes) and you’d get the rest of the way there. If you don’t like these suggestions, feel free to sub in your own ideas here.

For a country as big and rich as the United States, this stuff isn’t even very painful. We could do it in a single legislative session and 99% of the country would barely notice the effects. And yet it’s the next best thing to impossible. It doesn’t speak well for our future.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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