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[Thad]

So, okay.  Deficit commission releases plan involving broad, across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases.

From a purely numerical standpoint, it looks sound.  From a political one, it'll never happen; nobody wants to raise the age for social security or raise taxes on the middle class.  Nobody in either party likes this proposal.

It DOES raise some interesting questions as to what they WILL be willing to do.  I think there are likely some tea partiers who are more willing to cut military spending than establishment Republicans.

As for taxes, I see Democrats blinking and extending the Bush cuts across the board.  If we're lucky, they'll just extend the deadline and not make them permanent.

[TA]

That's not actually the commission's plan.  That's two members dropping a proposal that most of the rest of the commission does not approve of, and with good reason.  It's basically a lot of the worst ideas ever, designed to fuck the poor and middle class and enrich the wealthy, with a handful of good ideas to be cut in the negotiation process: eliminating the mortgage interest exemption (the rich don't have mortgages, they own their homes), cutting the corporate tax rate by a third, eliminating subsidized student loans, eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, limiting tax to income earned within the US and eliminating taxes on income earned abroad, shredding Social Security payouts and pushing back the ability to collect it by four years, dropping the top tax bracket from 35% to 23%, gutting Medicare ... this is a bad, bad plan.

[Shinra]

I hate these idiotic republican proposals that inevitably suggest tax cuts for the wealthy. How are we supposed to balance the budget while also reducing the money we're intaking?

I think the place we should start is rolling up taxes on the highest income brackets back to pre-Reagan era levels, for starters. I'd also like to see us eliminate all tax deductions for large businesses operating in the states. It's a little ridiculous when a multi-billion dollar company actually gets a fucking tax return, while we experience record budget deficits. I would be willing to bet that these tax loopholes are the biggest source of our income problems. Spending is only a part of the fucking issue, here.

[Brentai]

limiting tax to income earned within the US and eliminating taxes on income earned abroad

This is somehow not the stupidest thing in this document.

The actual stupidest thing in this document is the Third Option for taxes, which is literally "Let's set some complete assfuck tax rates for everybody in the country and then keep making them more assfuck until Congress agrees to something else."  I can only assume that was a sarcastic joke proposal by two people who are losing their fucking minds on this project.

(Bonus points for the other two suggestions both raising the lowest income bracket by 3-5%.  What?  They said they'd fight to keep the 35% rate on the highest bracket, and they did.  The rest of you dirt farmers can go fuck yourselves.)

[Pacobird]

Well, the whole point of international tax treaties is to avoid taxing people twice, so there could be an argument to be made that if you could use backing off taxing foreign income as leverage for securing more favorable trade agreements with the countries that would be picking up the slack, which would help U.S. exports and improve manufacturing.

I don't have to have read that to guess that isn't what's going on here, though.