TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Liberals, like Ezra Klein, have pointed out that “doing nothing”—e.g., sticking to what the CBO calls the current law baseline would bring government spending and tax revenue in line over the next few decades. There are two key elements: Bush’s tax cuts—80 percent of which went to individuals with less than $250,000 of income—are allowed to lapse and the Alternative Minimum tax isn’t fixed (which means higher taxes on the middle class), and Medicare payments are allowed to be slashed dramatically. Klein calls this the right framework to start with for fixing our budget problems.

Other than that following the sustainable growth rate for Medicare payments is impossible, Ross Douthat points out one other small problem:

All we need to do instead is let taxes rise and keep on rising. This is how the “current law baseline” cuts the deficit: Thanks to inflation and bracket creep, its tax code gradually subjects more and more Americans to rates that now fall only on the wealthy.

Today, for instance, a family of four making the median income — $94,900 — pays 15 percent in federal taxes. By 2035, under the C.B.O. projection, payroll and income taxes would claim 25 percent of that family’s paycheck. The marginal tax rate on labor income would rise from 29 percent to 38 percent. Federal tax revenue, which has averaged 18 percent of G.D.P. since World War II, would hit 23 percent by the 2030s and climb even higher after that.

Such unprecedented levels of taxation would throw up hurdles to entrepreneurship, family formation and upward mobility. (Or as the C.B.O. puts it, in its understated way, they would “tend to discourage some economic activity,” and “harm the economy through the impact on people’s decisions about how much to work and save.”)

Taxes would grow to more than 25 percent of GDP, without slowing down, by 2050. This isn’t a solution; not only would it mean much higher taxes on middle class Americans, it would mean a radical re-structuring of our society so we can continue supporting our current entitlement spending promises.

Last week, President Obama said that Paul Ryan’s budget proposal fundamentally altered America’s social compact. Actually, his plan aims to keep it the same: it attempts to make Medicare and Medicaid sustainable while keeping tax revenue and government spending roughly at their historical levels.

Ryan’s plan is far from perfect. It doesn’t include necessary health care reforms; it doesn’t raise revenue from tax reform; and it doesn’t seriously cut defense spending, both of which should be done to allow for a larger Medicare premium support growth rate. But it proposes actual entitlement reform, and that’s more serious than any proposal I’ve seen. He made his proposal knowing that Democrats would use it to say Republicans hate the sick and elderly, but he made it anyway—which is particularly brave because of how important seniors have become in elections.

The President, for his part, has proposed retaining entitlements in their current form with no pain. He said he’s aiming for $4 trillion of savings over 12 years, a nice little trick; un-specified savings from Medicare and the defense budget; and tax increases that fall entirely on the wealthy. That’s not a proposal. It’s election season rhetoric, meant to be music to our ears now and forgotten after November 2012.