However, the Committee for a Responsible Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that addresses federal budget and fiscal issues, says savings could fall to $1 trillion depending on “side deals” that fall outside the agreement.

“Getting the debt under control will require taking a serious look at health care, Social Security and the tax code,” CRFB president Maya MacGuineas said in a news release.

Don’t fall for this bullshit. It doesn’t require any of that. There’s no reason poor people need to suffer so that the rich can get richer.

Here’s a real solution to the budget deficit: raise taxes.

To stabilize the debt ratio at today’s level, we would need to either raise taxes or lower non-interest spending by 2.2% of GDP. This is eminently doable through tax increases alone, as our own historical past and the experience of other rich nations suggest. There may be political challenges to raising taxes, but there is very little reason economically to suggest this would be a bad way to solve the U.S. fiscal challenge.

Here’s a bathtub analogy of how the deficit works (same link):

To illustrate how the fiscal gap can be so manageable even though projected debt levels appear frighteningly high, imagine debt as the level of water in a bathtub. Water is flowing in from the top and draining from the bottom. Think of the fiscal gap as the rate at which water is coming from the faucet. Allowing water flow to increase too fast can overwhelm the ability of the drain to remove water and hence result in steadily rising water levels, causing the tub to eventually overflow. To extend the analogy, the effectiveness of the drain in keeping debt levels stable hinges on how low interest rates are and how high growth is. Low rates and fast growth allow lots of water to be removed from the debt tub. In recent decades, growth has exceeded interest rates, and hence any given flow of deficits (water coming into the tub) has not compounded rapidly into higher debt.

Yet for any given constellation of interest rates and growth, even a small reduction in the flow of water coming in can allow the drain to remove all of the incoming water, and the tub never overflows. In the same way, what’s most important is the size of the fiscal gap—or flow rate—as opposed to the magnitude of the overall debt—or total water in the bathtub—and how fast the drain is removing it.

Stop letting Amazon, Google, and other monopolies and oligarchies get away with literal murder, wage theft, safety violation, anti-competitive practices, and tax them to close the deficit gap.