"Which can be fixed either by increasing revenue or decreasing spending."
That's actually not quite true. A truer statement would be that for a given constant level of spending deficit, it can be closed by either increasing revenue or decreasing spending. But you can't assume a constant level of deficit, because time progresses and politicians adjust based on their income and outflows. (Not necessarily in a good way, but they are looking.)
Try to put yourself more in a physics frame of mind than a political one. It's the difference between statics and dynamics. Solving the budget problem with a static snapshot of a dynamic process isn't going to work. With the track record that our politicians have, just handing them more money isn't going to solve the problem if they're just going to spend even more of it. A static-forces model of the political appropriations process fails to predict reality, the model where politicians dynamically increase their spending even more than revenue does historically fares better.
(... yes, I know it is odd to approach politics from the point of view of building models to predict reality and seeing which ones successfully, no sarcasm at all, I see hardly anyone take this approach. But there are in fact enough hard facts out there to have some success with this approach, if you can learn to take your science-trained sensibilities and look at the political world. Political science need not be an oxymoron, though I suspect an actual study of political science wouldn't look much like what is currently called that.)
Your model itself is a significant assumption, though. Consider the Clinton tax hikes combined with some moderate restrictions on growth in spending as a counterexample: they ultimately led to the closest thing to a budget surplus we've had in our lifetimes, ignoring details like whether we technically were in surplus or not.
It is fair to ask whether that's sustainable, as in the 2000s we saw our politicians take those projected surpluses and spend them on tax subsidies for the well-off. Which, indeed, is just what that model predicts. But that just speaks to the need to elect better politicians and create better institutions to act as an endogenous curb on unjustified spending.
Your tone suggests you think you're contradicting me, but your last sentence is simply a restatement of my point. (I'm still trying to work out a clean way of stating it, so I take responsibility for that.) The solution needs to solve the dynamics of the problem. It may visibly manifest as tax hikes and/or spending cuts, but those will be effects, not cause.
That's actually not quite true. A truer statement would be that for a given constant level of spending deficit, it can be closed by either increasing revenue or decreasing spending. But you can't assume a constant level of deficit, because time progresses and politicians adjust based on their income and outflows. (Not necessarily in a good way, but they are looking.)
Try to put yourself more in a physics frame of mind than a political one. It's the difference between statics and dynamics. Solving the budget problem with a static snapshot of a dynamic process isn't going to work. With the track record that our politicians have, just handing them more money isn't going to solve the problem if they're just going to spend even more of it. A static-forces model of the political appropriations process fails to predict reality, the model where politicians dynamically increase their spending even more than revenue does historically fares better.
(... yes, I know it is odd to approach politics from the point of view of building models to predict reality and seeing which ones successfully, no sarcasm at all, I see hardly anyone take this approach. But there are in fact enough hard facts out there to have some success with this approach, if you can learn to take your science-trained sensibilities and look at the political world. Political science need not be an oxymoron, though I suspect an actual study of political science wouldn't look much like what is currently called that.)