A month and a half ago, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) released his "Roadmap for America's Future," a detailed plan to reform taxes and spending, and ultimately address our long-term debt problems in full. The CBO score of the proposal found that it would significantly improve our current debt path, and eliminate the debt in its entirety by 2080.

Rescuing us from the disaster that is the U.S. tax code while reducing the federal debt will require nothing short of a superhuman feat; Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Judd Gregg (R-NH) stepped up today to the challenge with a new tax proposal.

The United States is not the first nation to face tough fiscal challenges. Other countries have faced similar fiscal challenges – and gotten out of them.

In a new paper ("Fiscal Turnarounds: International Success Stories"), CRFB’s Fiscal Roadmap Project looks at successful fiscal turnarounds around the world and possible lessons for the U.S.

What are the lessons?

Earlier today, Senators Judd Gregg (R-NH), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) released what they call A Bipartisan Plan for Tax Fairness.

If the President's new deficit commission comes up with this idea, you can count on a lot of hilarious lines from Co-Chair Al Simpson.

Commission Coming – The White House says President Obama will create a fiscal commission by executive order within days. Meanwhile, Republicans still have not committed to participating.

Snow Job – Just hours after Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) announced they had reached a deal on a jobs bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plowed it under, saying it was too bloated with provisions not related to creating jobs. The Senate will consider the scaled-down version Reid crafted on February 22 when it returns from its week-long President’s Day recess.

We recently invited folks to take the spending challenge and show how they would close the budget gap without raising taxes (or alternatively, take the tax challenge and show the inverse). Our first contestant suggested cutting bureaucracy --  a good idea but one that doesn't get us too far.

Bob Williams, Rosanne Altshuler, Katie Lim of the Tax Policy Center took this challenge without even knowing it recently, in a  paper measuring what we would need to do on personal income tax rates in order to stabilize the debt.

Obviously the fiscal situation facing the country is bad. Deficits are massive; the debt is headed towards unprecedented territory; and the weak economic recovery could be derailed at any moment if credit markets get spooked about the U.S.’s fiscal prospects.

Yet still there are many politicians who don’t want to raise taxes at all (or in the softer version of the ‘no new taxes pledge’, don’t want to raise taxes on families making less than the poverty line…no wait…less than TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.)

At the start of the new decade, one in every ten Americans is unemployed. By broader measures of unemployment (including discouraged workers who may have stopped looking), nearly one out of every six people is unemployed or underemployed.

Earlier this week the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the congressional group that provides cost estimates and tax expertise to Congress, issued its annual report on tax expenditures. Tax expenditures are defined under the Budget Act and are changes in tax liability that result from special tax provisions or tax rules that provide tax benefits to a particular group of taxpayers.