It must be spring in the pundisphere because moderate Republicans with plans to solve our "fiscal crisis" are popping up faster than zombies in a grindhouse double feature. The latest contributor is David Brooks who starts with the obligatory observations on our moral decay:

First, you need to change social norms. The financial crisis has helped to teach people the dangers of excessive debt, but there’s probably going to have to be a public crusade — like the ones against littering and smoking — to hammer the point home. Think Warren Buffett TV spots.Think Oprah. Think Tom Hanks. Somebody has to remind the country that excessive debt is selfish.

Think countless Op Ed columns by supply side economists in the Wall Street Journal that assured us that there was no problem with savings because asset values, first stocks and then home prices were growing and paper gains are just the same as real savings.

Now the plan:

Second, the whole deficit hawk brand needs a makeover. Those people are a bunch of schoolmarms: “You’ve been bad. Eat your broccoli. Accept a lower standard of living.”

This is still a Billy Mays nation,thank God. The message has to be: “America can be richer and shinier!”Debt reduction has to be about renewal and prosperity, not pain and sacrifice.

That means deficit reduction has to be embedded in policies that produce growth. Michael Graetz of Columbia University has proposed replacing the current awful tax code with a value-added tax of 14 percent, cuts in the corporate tax rate, and a fair income tax with two simple brackets kicking in over $100,000. Many people have ideas to streamline the welfare state. The message has to be: we can afford to have a thick safety net, if it is more efficient.

Here is more or less how it is going to work:

First the thick, efficient safety net. This is from Paul Ryan but others have put in their two cents. Basically we cut gradually annual payments for Social Security until they are set at 32% of the income of earners in the 30th percentile - right now we could call that $25,000 and we would be generous. Which gives us something like $7,000 per year, again this is a generous estimateAdditional analysis here.

This might be above the poverty level, Wonks Anonymous is not really sure. Everybody would get this payment, millionaires like John McCain and ordinary folks but the point is that this would insure that there were a whole lot fewer rich old people living off the virtuous young.

Add a program that converts Medicare into vouchers worth less than current average medicare that can be used to buy insurance on the individual market and you have the shiny new welfare state.

Wonks Anonymous has seen thicker peignoirs

This is a lot broccoli, particularly for those of us who don't expect to have an ample trust fund to pay for our retirement. Relax, here comes the chocolate cake. We will simplify the tax code. Everybody gets to pay a 14% sales tax and corporate and personal income taxes will be cut, why we might just remove all taxes on interest dividends and profits. Of course we will probably remove all of those deductions that middle class folks use and maybe just get rid of those tax favored retirement accounts.

This will unleash the same torrents of economic growth that the last three rounds of tax cuts for the rich unleashed.

Once we had a surplus and the answer, promoted by Alan Greenspan and G. W. Bush, was tax cuts for the rich. Now we have a deficit and the answer is tax cuts for the rich.