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For one thing, Bowles and Simpson have taken a smart line on tax deductions and the like. Currently, we are losing approximately $1.1 trillion to policies such as the mortgage-interest tax deduction. And that deduction, just like the deductibility of health-insurance, overwhelmingly favors the people who need it the least: the wealthy. Ending such preferences would be a fundamentally progressive move, not to mention a fair and effective way to reduce the deficit.

Bowles and Simpson also refused to treat the defense budget as sacrosanct—proposing tens of billions in cuts to unnecessary weapons programs and laying off many defense contractors. Maintaining America’s military dominance should be a key priority for those on both the left and the right. But, as Gregg Easterbrook argues in the new issue of TNR, preserving our military strength need not be synonymous with squandering billions on wasteful, largely useless Pentagon programs. Bowles and Simpson seem to recognize this.

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From “In Defense of the Deficit Commission” at The New Republic.

I think these two paragraphs really get at the heart of the problem with our budget, which isn’t that we spend too much subsidizing the poor through welfare programs. It’s that we spend trillions through tax expenditures (don’t forget that spending through tax cuts and loopholes and spending through appropriations aren’t significantly different) to subsidize the wealthy or at least well-off. Then on top of that, we dump money into the pit of waste that is the DOD budget, most often because politicians are afraid (with good reason) of the political consequences of controlling defense spending.

If we’re going to start cutting spending, the place to start isn’t in social programs that provide vital services to the poorest in society (though in many cases these programs require reform). These programs are moral requirements and economically quite prescient. The place to cut spending is in wasteful tax expenditures and defense contracting that exist for no other reason than that politicians are afraid to cut them.

More on the deficit commission in the next few days.