In recent weeks, TaxVox has posted a couple of articles (here and here) that expressed concerns about Representative Paul Ryan's dramatic fiscal plan aimed at balancing the budget and eliminating the national debt by the end of the century. Today, the Wisconsin Republican issued this response.

A new study by a national anti-smoking group argues that states could raise more than $9 billion in new revenues if they all hiked cigarette taxes by $1-a-pack. The levy wouldn’t come close to balancing recession-ruined state budgets, but it wouldn’t hurt. And, the group says, the higher tax would keep 2.3 million kids from becoming smokers and convince 1.2 million adults to quit, saving one million lives and $52 billion in health costs over the long-run. The study comes from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) and senior Republican Chuck Grassley (R-IA) today proposed a big new jobs bill. The centerpiece of the measure would exempt businesses that hire unemployed workers this year from the employer portion of the Social Security payroll tax.

I suspect he doesn’t want to hear this, but Representative Paul Ryan’s dramatic proposal to remake the federal budget is the best argument I’ve seen for why tax increases must be part of any serious effort to reduce the federal deficit.

Try a simple exercise. Take President Obama’s revenue proposals at face value and see what they tell us about the fiscal world in 2020. The bottom line: A major tax cut relative to doing nothing, but nonetheless an increase in tax revenues to something close to historical levels. And continued large and unsustainable deficits.

Word is getting around that CBO has blessed a major budget reform plan proposed by Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) as, in the words of National Review Online, “a roadmap to solvency.” It isn’t true.

An OMB spokesman tells TaxVox that President Obama’s tax reform panel still plans to report its findings to the president. The spokesman clarified comments on Monday by Budget Director Peter Orszag that suggested the panel’s report would be rolled into the White House’s recently-announced deficit reduction panel, rather than released separately.

It appears that Budget Director Peter Orszag has signaled the end of President Obama’s ill-fated Tax Reform Commission. In his budget briefing yesterday, Peter had this to say:

President Obama broke new ground last year by presenting a budget that assumed changes in the tax law as part of his baseline. Because no one wants to see the Bush tax cuts disappear as scheduled next year or the estate tax go after mere millionaires or the AMT hit a third of all taxpayers, his 2010 budget simply assumed that 2009 tax rules would become permanent and ignored the cost of forgone revenue.

With great fanfare, the President in his 2010 State of the Union address announced a new small business tax credit that will go to “over one million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages.” A White House fact sheet described the credit as a “powerful short term incentive to not only create good jobs but to increase wages and hours for Americans with jobs.”