This isn't going to be pretty or end well:
President Obama's fiscal commission held its first meeting on Tuesday, hearing testimony from Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, OMB director Peter Orszag, and two former directors of the Congressional Budget Office. Although the commission has not yet gotten around to discussing specific proposals, panel members and the experts they heard from agreed that any real solution to a problem as large as the country's fiscal imbalance is going to hurt. The nation's red ink hit a record $1.4 trillion last year.
[. . .]
Former CBO director Robert Reischauer, who now heads the Urban Institute, told the panel that there are no easy solutions.
“Don't waste time looking for silver bullets or new approaches to hold out the promise of painless sacrifice,” said Reischauer. “You're going to have to raise taxes. You're going to have to cut spending. It's going to have to hurt.”
In the most recent ABC News-Washington Post poll, Americans by 56-40 percent said they preferred smaller government with fewer services, almost exactly the average for the past 26 years, so we know which option the voters prefer. But by a vast 77-15 percent margin, the though President Obama pergers the opposite, which shows they know which option is really going to be pushed. But they also blame President Bush more than Obama for the deficit, 59-25 percent, so they're not overly partisan when considering how we got into this mess.
