At long last, a Senate plan to balance the budget

◼ One of the biggest myths propagated by Washington's professional politicians is the idea that balancing the federal budget requires some sort of superhuman political and budgetary wisdom. - Washington Examiner EDITORIAL

Both political parties are afflicted with this defeatist thinking. President Obama's latest proposed federal spending blueprint is a depressing case in point. The Obama proposal assumes $47 trillion more spending, $1.9 trillion in new taxes and a national debt of $25.9 trillion -- at the end of the decade. Things look somewhat better over in the Republican-controlled House, where the budget committee's Road to Prosperity proposal cuts $4.4 trillion more from planned spending than the Obama budget, but only "puts the budget on the path to balance," rather than eliminating annual deficits entirely.

Now along comes the Senate Tea Party Caucus with a budget proposal -- dubbed "A Platform to Revitalize America" -- that not only balances federal spending and revenues in five years, but produces a $117 billion surplus in 2017. The plan is the handiwork of the three senators who make up the Senate Tea Party Caucus -- Jim DeMint, R-S.C., Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah. "The whole point here is to show we can reasonably balance the budget within a five-year period. This idea that we have to look 30 years out to balance the budget is not only unnecessary, but it's improbable. We cannot continue to spend at our current rate for 10 more years, much less 20 or 30 more years. This is an urgent matter," said DeMint last week. Read the rest...