Taxes: Raise them or not?

Democrats seem to have finally come around, very reluctantly, to admitting that the federal budget needs to be cut, though they still are wildly unrealistic about how much it needs to be cut, and they still persist in the delusion that the fiscal problem can be solved without touching entitlements.

Republicans have taken a stand that taxes should not be raised, because, they argue, increasing taxes is the last thing one wants to do in an weak economy. This is a more difficult issue to understand. On the one hand, more federal revenues would certainly help the fiscal problem, though it is by no means certain that raising taxes would increase the revenue much -- it might just depress the economy more, and it will certainly encourage corporations and wealthy individuals to put more of their money in offshore investments or tax-free bonds.

On the other hand, raising taxes seems to me just an easy out for all those in Congress who can't seem to face cutting the federal budget.  In any case, one can't raise taxes enough to make much of a dent in the deficit, so tax increases (especially on the rich) are just pandering to the base, not solving the problem.

On balance, I think major (draconian) cuts in the federal budget are the essential step to solving the problem, painful as they will be.  The only real issue is how to make them so the pain is relatively even all around.  And I think rather than raising federal taxes, Congress needs to bite the bullet and FINALLY revise and simplify the tax code, so that it doesn't have thousands of special interest exemptions, and it doesn't take a lawyer to understand the 20,000+ pages of the federal tax code.

So after thinking about it, I guess I agree with the Republicans, who are indeed probably just pandering to their own base, but are nevertheless probably right to focus on spending cuts rather than tax increases.