Lost in the Ryan budget debate, we can forget that, as Catherine Rampell reminds us, we "already have a number of 'serious' long-term fiscal restraint proposals on the table":
None of these myriad proposals have ever gotten any traction, and they have, for the most part, been less drastic than Mr. Ryan’s. They’ve failed not because they were unserious, but because even these less drastic measures were too politically unpopular. For this reason, I’m not betting any money that the Ryan plan, with its even more painful provisions cutting entitlements, will somehow be more politically palatable in the near future.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The country’s budget problems are not a failure of policy ingenuity, but a failure of political willpower.
Aaron Carroll runs through other plans to get our fiscal house in order.
The Dish 