Howard Gleckman of TaxVox opens his post on how to evaluate the seriousness of the Deficit Commission with two strong observations:

1. No New Taxes: Republicans will have to extricate themselves from their pledge to never raise taxes on anyone at any time. It is not possible to resolve the fiscal mess without new revenues. The honest discussion is what mix of revenues and spending cuts is best, and where to collect new taxes. If the Rs are willing to have that conversation, this panel will have achieved a major breakthrough. If not, our time will be better spent watching Dancing with the Stars.

This is fair. But it is also fair to say that we need to see deep cuts on the spending side before we contemplate tax increases, and Republicans and Democrats are both obstacles on that front.

2. No New Taxes on the Middle-Class: Similarly, commission Democrats need to help Obama extract himself from his own pledge, made repeatedly in the campaign and in the nearly 18 months since, that he won’t raise taxes on those making less than $200,000 or couples making less than $250,000. Even if Congress could agree to control future spending, there are not enough rich people to finance a government that spends, say, 20 percent or 21 percent of Gross Domestic Product. As the Tax Policy Center has shown, a deficit reduction plan that exempts those $200,000 earners from tax increases would drive top bracket rates to close to 80 percent. In a recent interview with The New York Times correspondent John Harwood, Obama appeared to be leaving himself some wiggle room. The panel can help bail him out, but eventually he will have to do a lot more than wiggle.

Wiggle room indeed. Did anyone take the 2008 pledge at face-value? My sense is that it was about neutralizing an anxious constituency that had good reason to be anxious, and that is turning against the Democrats, though not necessarily towards Republicans. Keeping ACA intact is far more important to the White House than holding the line on middle class taxes. But that’s the problem: raising the tax burden on middle class voters isn’t as difficult as paring back entitlements.

On entitlement reform, Gleckman first suggests that Democrats concede that some action needs to be taken on Social Security. Not surprisingly, I tend to think that we need a more aggressive approach towards restructuring the program along lines of a notional defined contribution. He continues with:

4. Medicare Cost-savings: I remain flabbergasted that Obama and congressional Democrats were willing to take steps in the health bill to control future cost growth in Medicare—and were opposed by Republicans. GOP commission members need to get serious and work towards responsible cost-cutting in the government’s biggest cost driver. This can be done without jeopardizing anyone’s health but it requires pols of both parties to tell seniors that more medical care is not necessarily better medical care.

I hardly think Gleckman should be flabbergasted: the Obama administration learned the extraordinary power of the CBO’s estimates in determining the shape of the political landscape, and so they manufactured a bill applied every politically plausible revenue-enhancement to a Medicaid expansion and a program of subsidies that exacerbates the long-term fiscal problem. After increasing the Medicare payroll tax for high-earners, imposing a weak Cadillac tax, consolidating student loan programs, and launching a series of pilot programs that may or may not yield savings and assign the political risk to IPAB … what else can you do to close the revenue gap faced by the federal government as a whole? I mean, this wasn’t even all low-hanging fruit, as evidenced by the contentiousness of the debate — it was medium-hanging fruit.

This is why many of us wanted to retain all of the cost savings and revenue enhancements in the bill and apply it to funding the docfix. I would vote for that package in a heartbeat, despite the glaring problems in the revenue measures.