I just want to note that I agree with much of what Josh Barro has to say in his recent post on bankruptcy rhetoric:

If the United States were actually facing a debt crisis, in danger of losing access to the bond markets—a Greek-like situation, real insolvency—it would be quite reasonable to hold the debt ceiling negotiations hostage while demanding a fiscal adjustment that would sharply reduce debt-to-GDP ratios.
The “we’re broke” mindset simultaneously explains what might seem like a paradox of conservative thinking today: federal deficits are alarming and unsustainable, undermining our national credit, and yet we should not think about raising taxes.
If you have a bad-but-fixable debt problem, tax increases are a logical part of the austerity package to get you on the road to health. Just look at any country in Europe that’s actually implementing an austerity plan. But if things are already too far gone to fix, if we’re really broke, why bother raising taxes? That’s just more money down the hole. Conveniently, this position allows Republicans to conclude that alarming deficits are cause for spending cuts, but not for tax increases.

My basic view is that, as Yuval Levin has argued, the real danger to the U.S. fiscal position is the exploding cost of health entitlements, particularly after 2021, and fixing health entitlements should be our most urgent priority. Any political strategy that makes it easier to fix health entitlements should be pursued, and any strategy that makes it more difficult should be abandoned. The debate over increasing the debt limit has, I suspect, badly damaged the ability of center-right lawmakers to advance broad-based health entitlement reform. I hope I’m wrong, but I think that the debate has badly damaged the Republican brand, particularly over the last two weeks. It might seem trivial to speak of brands, but in this space a strong brand affords leverage.

I imagine that I am somewhat more reluctant than Josh to raise taxes, but I agree that anyone who embraces bankruptcy rhetoric would have to take tax increases that will not damage economic growth, e.g., the elimination of various tax expenditures that exacerbate cost growth in the markets for housing and medical care, more seriously.