Senate Democrats, with backing from the White House, yesterday proposed a plan to avert the sequester by cutting $120 billion. One quarter of the savings come from eliminating direct payments under the farm bill.The package offered by Senate Democratic leaders is dead on arrival. A sequester gets all the deficit reduction from spending, but this plan gets half its savings from tax increases. Moreover, the proposed savings would not be comparable to the sequester cuts. Whereas sequestration would eliminate spending this year, the numbers in the proposed plan are multi-year numbers. The tax numbers are somewhat suspect. A Congressional Budget Office study from July 2012 shows that the effective tax rate for those taxpayers in the top 1 per...

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