deficit commission 1 - Hope For A Big Check

I knew a young woman, whom we will call L H, in Denton, Texas in the early seventies. She worked for the International House of Pancakes and had to struggle to make ends meet. She had trouble keeping track of how many hours that she worked each week and was frequently surprised by the size of her pay check. On many occasions, when she was calculating how she would get by during the next week, she would say, "Well, I guess I'll just hope for a big check."
Last night on PBS nightly news hour, I watched Jeffrey Brown interview three people about the deficit reduction preliminary report. On the left was Damon Silvers from the AFL-CIO who said the proposal will kill jobs, that we just needed to tax the rich, and not cut anything. In the center was Maya MacGuineas of the New America Foundation who argued for the new proposal. On the right was Grover Norquist who said that we did not need the 1 trillion in increased taxes over 10 years. He said that if we would just increase the growth rate of the economy from 2% to 3%, then that extra 1% would cover the trillion and we wouldn't need a tax increase. Silvers then agreed with Norquist that, if we were just willing to have the economy grow at 3% a year instead of 2%, then that extra 1% would solve the problem. But, said Silvers, this document is not a starting point.
So if one thinks of the GDP as the country's check, then these two bird dogs on the extremes ended up agreeing that we should go with the growth approach. Don't do that belt-tightening thing.

Just hope for a big check.
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