Congress and President ignore the first law of holes

When you are in one, stop digging--Donald Marron's 6-step program for derailing our fiscal train wreck:

1. Set firm budget goals, like a 70% debt-to-GDP ratio, and put mechanisms in place to ensure you will be held accountable for meeting them. 
2. Keep all options open, by combining proposals to cut spending, increase revenues, and, where possible, boost growth. 
3. Reduce the growth rate of spending.
4. Recognize that different spending challenges require different approaches. For Social Security, the key issue is political will... For Medicare and Medicaid ... policymakers should approach health spending as a research-and-development challenge, not as a one-time matter of setting specific policy dials. 
5. Not all taxes are created equal --Taxes on income, for example, are usually worse for the economy than taxes on consumption.
6. Obey the first law of holes