Fiscal "Cliff" Reminders

So Washington continues to jockey for negotiating position on the upcoming changes in tax and spending levels that kick in January 1.  Summing up where I stand:

• The whole conversation continues to get sidetracked in ways that make no sense.  The hysteria about the Fiscal Cliff seems to blend in with hysteria about the allegedly ballooning deficit (I say "allegedly" because the deficit has been going down the last two years, though it's still very high).  People seem to forget that if congress does nothing and allows the sequester to happen and the Bush tax cuts to expire and doesn't do the annual Medicare "doc fix", then the deficit problem in the short to medium term is just about totally solved.  In other words, jumping off the Fiscal Cliff would be good for the deficit.
• But that doesn't mean it would be good for the economy- it seems like economists from all over the political spectrum agree that so much austerity at one time, with an economy still very fragile, could drive the US back into recession.  All one needs to look at for evidence is what happened in Spain, Greece, Ireland, and the UK when they hiked taxes and cut spending all at once in a bad economy- it got much worse.
• Americans just don't seem to understand this- we equate deficit problem with job market problems, when in fact the difficulty is that higher deficits help the job market- if we fix one problem, we worsen the other.
• What's eventually needed on the tax side is really a middle class tax hike along with the upper class tax hike.  We need Clinton-era rates across the board.  That's not a very exciting platform to run on for Democrats, though, so I can understand Obama's refusal to consider it.  Still, no deficit is likely to be solved in the long run without more revenue from the middle.  I'm fine with putting off that revenue hike until the economy is cooking, but I fear a permanent tax cut for the middle class, leaving the government underfunded in the long term.
• I would really like a liberal position to enter the conversation on entitlements.  Social Security is not a mess; it just needs tweaks.  All the tweaks I hear about involve fewer benefits for recipients down the road.  At the same time, there's a very easy tweak right in front of us: raise the ceiling of income subject to social security taxes.  Right now incomes over $106,000 aren't subject to social security taxes.  Raise that to something higher, and the program becomes solvent just like that, and elderly people can continue to live with some dignity. 
• Medicare is a much harder problem to solve.  But it would be a mistake to solve it by offloading all the cost to Seniors who can't pay it.  Especially when we haven't tried much else to rein the costs in.