Ezra Klein reports that Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, is about to unveil a Democratic alternative to Rep. Ryan’s budget.

Last night, I spoke with Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who became ranking member on the House Budget Committee after the election. “We will have a Democratic alternative,” he told me. “We’ll have it ready as a substitute when the Republican budget comes to the floor of the House, which is a week from tomorrow.”

Rep. Van Hollen wasn’t very specific, but Ezra notes that the outlines of an alternative are easy to imagine:

If you let the Bush tax cuts expire, implemented the Affordable Care Act (including, importantly, the excise tax and the Independent Payment Advisory Board, both of which Ryan would repeal), extended the payment-board model to Medicaid, and capped both non-defense discretionary and defense discretionary, you’d pretty much be there. But Democrats have been very reluctant to let the Bush tax cuts expire for anyone but the very rich, and they’ve had trouble communicating the cost savings in the health-care law, much less expanding them. So it’ll be interesting to see where Van Hollen and the Democrats go with this. Ryan has really raised the standard for policy ambition, and it’ll be hard to get much attention for a budget that doesn’t follow his lead on that.

If Rep. Van Hollen and comes out swinging in favor of significant tax increases, I think we’ll all have to tip our hats to him for doing what President Obama has so far failed to do. I can easily imagine Rep. Van Hollen finding a number — $250,000? $500,000? — above which he’ll propose a marked increase in marginal tax rates. This will be tricky because he represents an affluent district in suburban Maryland, and, as Ruth Marcus has observed, balancing the budget by raising marginal tax rates for high-earners is tough:

I’m all for a more progressive tax code. But consider: The Tax Policy Center examined what it would take to avoid raising taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year while reducing the deficit to 3 percent of the economy by decade’s end. The top two rates would have to rise to 72.4 and 76.8 percent, more than double the current level.

One has to assume that MTRs at that level would have an impact on labor supply. Alan Viard addressed the economic impact of the high-income rate reductions in September of 2010, and his findings should give Rep. Van Hollen pause as he puts the finishing touches on his plan:

[T]he high-income rate reductions provide much greater incentive for investment and other economic activity, relative to revenue loss, than the middle-class tax cuts. The expiration of the former and extension of the latter therefore combine much of the disincentive effects of full expiration with much of the deficit increase of full extension.

Perhaps Rep. Van Hollen will pursue a more creative angle, like a heavier reliance on Pigovian taxes, like a carbon tax. I’d recommend taking a look at “Are U.S. States Equally Prepared for a Carbon-Constrained World?,” a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Table 1, on pages 78 and 79, show carbon emission per capita across the states.