My budget proposal

By Ezra Klein
WashPost

Here’s a realistic list of what I’d like to see done:

1. Full implementation of the Affordable Care Act — which means Medicare’s cost growth is held to GDP plus 1 percent and the employer health-care deduction gets eaten away by the excise tax — strengthened by passage of the Rockefeller-Lieberman-Whitehouse proposal to strengthen the Independent Payment Advisory Board and the package proposed by Mark Warner and others to accelerate and expand the cost control experiments in Medicare.

2. The Bush tax cuts for the rich expire in 2012, and the rest of the Bush tax cuts phase out by 2015. The Clinton-era rates were fine, and Bush’s tax cuts were supposed to rid us of a surplus that we clearly don’t have anymore. A tax reform process would be nice — the expenditures have gotten out of hand, and the AMT will need to be fixed — but only if it abides by this revenue target.

3. A discretionary-spending freeze split equally between defense and non-defense buckets, as Simpson and Bowles recommended.

4. A small increase in the gas tax to fund infrastructure investment. If it was good enough for Ronald Reagan, it’s good enough for us. And we need it.

(More here.)