IBD

In his biography of Milton Friedman, Lanny Ebenstein quotes the Nobel laureate economist: "If taxes are raised in order to keep down the deficit, the result is likely to be a higher norm for government spending. Deficits will again mount and the process will be repeated."

With the benifit of 42 years, the only thing we should add to this insight is "will be" in place of Friedman's "is likely to" when it comes to higher spending levels.

Budget projections only reinforce that point. At the end of last year, the Congressional Budget Office ran projections well into the baby boomers' retirement.
CBO assumed on the revenue side that none of the 2001 tax cuts continued beyond their 2010 expiration and the AMT's ensnarement of middle class went unmitigated.
As the table shows, by 2050, revenues reach 23.5% of GDP. On the spending side, CBO assumed not only that would there be no new spending, but that health care's skyrocketing rate would somehow be curtailed. Even so, federal spending reaches 28.1%of GDP.

Even under an egregiously aggressive tax system and optimistically parsimonious spending assumptions, revenues still can't keep pace. Lack of revenues is not the problem now, and it will not be the problem in the future.