Isabel Sawhill is a well-regarded moderate Democrat and a leading light at the Brookings Institution. She’s long stressed the need for bipartisan solutions to looming fiscal imbalances. And she definitely doesn’t like Rep. Ryan’s budget:

How should the President and other progressives respond? For starters, progressives should be unabashed in labeling the Ryan plan for what it is: an ideological manifesto for a Tea-Party-dominated Republican Party.

Here’s what the progressive rebuttal should be in a nutshell: 1) point out that voodoo economics is back in full gear; 2) start talking about tax reform and its potential to produce a fairer, simpler, and more pro-growth system that has the added advantage of plugging a big hole in the budget; 3) instead of worrying about protections for the elderly, many of whom are quite affluent, remind people that, whether young or old, wealthy Americans have made out like bandits in recent decades and that it’s time to do something for working families of modest means; 4) rethink America’s defense posture and whether we can continue to be the world’s policeman, and 5) be open to some reforms to Medicare and Medicaid but only if they’re combined with additional revenues and a more streamlined military.

Sawhill goes on to elaborate on these themes, and she lands some blows. On the first point, some of the claims regarding what Rep. Ryan’s approach would do for employment levels are outlandish. On the second, I think it’s fair to point out that Rep. Ryan is offering a starting point, and that a final tax reform proposal could draw on Bowles-Simpson and President Bush’s tax reform panel, among many other sources. The broad contours — curb tax expenditures and lower rates — strike me as sound. Sawhill wants to pare back tax expenditures to pay for public spending, which is a perfectly respectable position to take. On the third point, I think Rep. Ryan would agree with Sawhill more than most elected Democrats, and this might be a constructive starting point for intracoalition bargaining between, say, people like Sawhill and people like Richard Trumka. On the fourth point, it seems fair to mention that Rep. Ryan embraced President Obama’s defense expenditures. 

Rep. Ryan is willing to give President Obama and Secretary Gates the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the defense expenditures we need to maintain. Isabel Sawhill and I think that there is more room to trim defense expenditures. This is not obviously a partisan dispute pitting a “Tea-Party-dominated Republican Party” against progressives. Rep. Ryan wants to keep taxes low and he’s willing to shift some of the responsibility for medical expenditures onto affluent and healthy future retirees to do so. Sawhill wants to tweak the balance slightly, but she basically wants to do something similar. 

I would be delighted if this were the debate we were having. Instead we have the president’s budget and Rep. Ryan’s budget, and plenty of room for progressives to make their long-term priorities regarding revenues and spending explicit. 

My take is that Sawhill would make a tremendous contribution if she succeeded in persuading progressives and congressional Democrats of the virtues of her approach.