As Jonathan Chait and a couple of dozen NR readers helpfully pointed out, I made a stupid error yesterday, using an estimate for total U.S. government spending (federal, state, local, counties, school districts, off-budget items, etc, estimated to run about 45 percent of GDP) in illustrating my remarks about the difficulty of coming up with a bipartisan plan that balances the budget with a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. The real numbers are more like this: federal spending, 25 percent of GDP; federal revenue, 15 percent of GDP; deficit, 10 percent of GDP.

I am not, in general, in favor of tax increases, but I think that Chait is correct that conservatives would do better to support a budget plan that combines real spending cuts with tax increases than to support a budget that does nothing to reduce spending but leaves taxes where they are or reduces them. The point being, from my point of view: Reducing government spending is paramount, and it is a much more important agenda item than tax cuts that will only defer the financial reckoning that our spending inevitably entails.

Closing the gap from revenues that equal 15 percent of GDP and spending that equals 25 percent of GDP still looks pretty hard to me. To repeat yesterday’s thought-experiment, say we construct a point-by-point trade-off, equalizing spending and revenue at 20 percent of GDP. I don’t see Republicans supporting a 33 percent tax increase or Democrats supporting a 20 percent spending cut. Lots of readers have made clever suggestions about how we get there, but none of them seem convincing to me. The trade-offs would have to be pretty significant, like collecting that 20 percent of GDP via a flat tax and enacting deep entitlement reform.