Looking at the revenue side of the deficit equation

In the post 2008 economic crash world, raising taxes  to increase revenue to solve the deficit problem   has been a third rail of politics.  About 40% of the deficit, according to many experts, is due to the decline of tax revenue because of the decline in economic activity.  As the economy recovers, some of the deficit will go away.

The response of the Tea Party and the GOP has been to cut, cut, cut...and shrink, shrink shrink government to bring expenses into balance with funds available. In so doing, they have heartlessly  placed the burden of cuts on the poor, needy, families, education, infrastructure, job creation and social safety nets.   They want to reduce the size of government even more just for the sake of shrinking government. It is their ideological imperative. They will address entitlement cuts if the Democrats take the fall for it.

The Democrats have countered with class warfare: raise the taxes on the rich but do not raise taxes on the middle class.  Cut defense. Do not cut entitlements.

If resolving the debt  is a long term  goal to which both parties subscribe, their loyalty to both ideology and constituent support has brought them to an impasse.

The Bowles-Simpson debt reduction commission has a proposal that has not yet garnered some serious interest:  flatten the tax more (though allow a degree of graduation) for both corporate and individuals, and cut out loopholes.  How this would be constructed would determine  how much much more revenue would be generated, but advantages would be several: It would shuffle the deck so that the sacred cows of special interests would be lost in the fog of  so many  changes at  one time they would have difficulty  selling their  self  serving   cases to the general public to keep their loopholes in tact.. The other would be to remove the constant pressure from special interests and put a damper on the institutional corruption that campaign contributions feed.  It might result in lower taxes and increased revenue. It might not...but it is worth exploring seriously.

An argument against fundamentally changing the tax structure is that no matter how it is done, special interests will keep amending it in the future to reinsert loopholes.  That may be true, but it would be nice to begin at a lower baseline than the screwed up structure we have now.