Peter Orszag’s First NYT Column

Peter Orszag makes his debut on Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed page. What does President Obama’s former Office of Budget and Management chief have to say? It’s pretty anodyne. Faced with “a painful jobs deficit in the near term and an unsustainable budget deficit over the medium and long term,” Orszag says the “best approach is compromise.” He says Congress should extend the Bush tax cuts—including those for the highest income brackets, if need be—for two years and then repeal them altogether. Orszag writes, “It’s hard to believe, however, that effectively returning the tax code to its 1990s form would lead to economic catastrophe, especially when many leading Republican economists—including Alan Greenspan and Martin Feldstein—agree that we can’t afford to continue the tax cuts forever. More troubling, middle-class and lower-class families would be saddled with higher taxes. That’s a legitimate concern, but also a largely unavoidable one if we are to tackle the medium-term fiscal problem.”