Stephen Grenville has some commendably sane proposals for getting the US out of its economic hole, including some suggestions for increasing government revenues.
But opposition to tax increases on the right of American politics is now so absolute that even modest proposals such as those suggested by Stephen simply have no hope of being heard, let alone implemented. Witness this scene from last Friday's Republican presidential debate, where all eight candidates were asked if they could back a budget proposal that had a ten-to-one ratio of spending cuts to tax increases:
