But it’s been depressing to listen to some of the freshmen House members talk about this subject, because I get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that they’re genuinely serious and “no tax increases!” is meant in an absolute and maximalist manner. Revenue must be brought back up to its historic average, at the very least, and we’re still a fair ways from that: If we’re going to do major monkeying with the tax code, now’s the best time, for the simple fact that if we screw up, revenues can’t go much lower than currently are.

Much of the current hazard in the medium-term of America’s fiscal outlook stems from the fact that the government wants to fund roughly half of its operations with debt. Now then, major structural changes the Big Three of entitlement programs will ablate the debt explosion, but such will require sizable transition costs and, barring something that radically changes what is politically possible, will take at least a decade to implement and start generating savings anyway. The simple fact of the matter is that, if deficits running at 10% of GDP are not your cup of tea, you have to reconcile yourself with the necessity of “squeezing more blood from the turnips”, as it was aptly put on the front page yesterday.

And then there’s the entirely separate question about what the size of government actually is, whether one cares about the size of government versus its scope, and all of the policy considerations attendant thereto. But that’s a romp for another thread, as I suspect whatever disagreements we may have about them are mooted by our concurrence that as it stands the federal government is both too large in terms of its aggregate size and too broad in its scope.

Because the GOP does look like it’s made up of a bunch of poo-flinging simians when it sits on its hands, screaming that taxes cannot go up, on anyone, under any circumstances. It also makes them look like flaming hypocrites, as they dig in to defend the current status quo of the tax code, when the GOP’s own platform calls for massively revising it. (To say nothing of the rather yawning chasm between the stated purpose of the GOP to impose fiscal discipline contrasted with its removing a legitimate method of alleviating the debt problem. And as cute as saying “we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem!” is — and as much as I sympathize with it — such conveniently averts its eyes to the fact that we’re still well off historical norms in terms of revenue.)

And, on the wider point, the GOP as a matter of principle shouldn’t be opposed to revenue enhancement. It wants to be the party of fiscal sanity? Fine and dandy: Raising more revenue is a valid public policy tool for dealing with chronic deficits, and shouldn’t be shied away from. That said, there are good and bad ways to raise revenue: The party ought to, in principle, support doing it in the right way — as we’ve discussed herein, base-broadening and rate-flattening — while opposing ways that are rather more destructive. The point is to articulate a coherent GOP position on revenue enhancement, as that’s the only way to inoculate it against the Democrats’ inevitable broadsides that they’re uncompromising zealots who refuse to continence even the most modest increase in revenue. And that they’re tools of the rich, intent on obstructing the will of the people for their private jet-owning corporate masters, or whatever the Obama administration’s bugaboo is of the week.

“I’ve never found a battle plan very useful in the face of the enemy, but the process of planning itself immensely useful,” or something to that extent.

As much as I hate to say it, but in the event of the trigger being pulled, the Army will in all likelihood need to be thrown under the bus. If we are going to return to more modest defense spending in an era of a more modest foreign policy, than we need to once more evaluate our force structure through the lens of when we were last there, which was for the first three-and-a-half decades of the Twentieth Century, which was a time of an ascendant Navy and a standing Army that was constabulatory at best.

So, in budgetary terms, we’d be looking at prioritizing the power projection elements of the existing force structure, which is the entirety of the Navy and the Marine Corps, as well as the USAF’s airborne infrastructure, airlifting, and strategic forces, with the costs being borne predominantly by the Army and the USAF’s tac-air forces. (Really, in such a scenario, there’s a good case to be made for abolishing the USAF entirely and assigning its assets to the Army and Navy as is appropriate for their newly envisioned roles.) Of course, this would likely destroy the JSF, as the only form of cost-containment left in it is praying repeatedly that the massive buys that the USAF is obligated to make somehow allow costs to be somewhat restrained by serial production. It’d also require the funding of the EFV, which Gates and his successor have been adamant in killing.