THIS is the Third Way?

Eating our retirement seed corn?

I'm glad he agrees with me that we can't cut or spend our way to prosperity.  But burning the finances of the future in an attempt to bail us out of the present is a true recipe for total disaster.

There is no first, second or third way out of our mess.  There is only one, historically proven way:  raise taxes.  It isn't an accident that the two most prosperous periods in our history--the 1950s and the 1990s--both came about when we faced the fact that civilization has a price tag, and civilized people (if they want to stay that way) had better be prepared to pay it.  (Thanks for the opportunity to paraphrase, OWH.)

Tax hikes are, in their own way, the equivalent of welfare reform.  They force people of means to put their money to work, which is the only thing that leads to real growth and job creation.  The wealthy aren't any more virtuous with their money than the more; they need a big stick to make them do the right thing.

Yes, conservatives, it's counterintuative, but so is most of life.  Get over it.

Winston Churchill once said that you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else.  Let's hope that, when it comes to taxes, he was right.