Never mind all the Sturm und Drang...

...coming out of Congress and the White House these days. The budget will be balanced by letting the Bush tax cuts expire in 2012. (It's the path of least resistance.) Ross Douthat of the Times is the latest convert (my emphasis):

Does a plan to cut the deficit with middle-class tax increases exist? In a sense, it does. It’s called the “current law baseline,” a Congressional Budget Office projection in which the Bush-era tax rates aren’t renewed in 2012, the Alternative Minimum Tax (which is supposed to hit only the rich but increasingly bites into middle-class paychecks) isn’t indexed for inflation, and Medicare payments to doctors are slashed by 20 percent.

With these policies, the deficit drops away in the next 10 years, and more important, it stays manageably low for the decades after that.

This projection has become a touchstone for liberal wonks — “the graph that all budget discussions should start with,” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote last week. It does not represent their ideal policy vision by any means, but it is frequently cited as proof that we do not need to radically reform entitlements to keep the country solvent.