Answer: REALLY F'ING HARD!
I stumbled across this really cool website that lets you play with the budget on the revenue and expenditure side to see if you can balance the budget.
As a progressive Democrat, naturally I started with the revenue side by modestly increasing taxes on the highest income earners and biggest corporations.
This had only a tiny impact on the deficit. So I kept tweaking and tried cutting some spending and I still couldn't get the annual deficit below $1 trillion.
This tool doesn't take into account the positive revenue benefits from an economy that is (hopefully) improving and growing again, which is projected to help more than halve the deficit over the next few years.
Still, to eliminate the remaining $600 billion (rounded number) per year budget gap will require some very tough sacrifices from every American. To underscore the point, keep in mind that the entire non-defense discretionary budget is around $450 billion.
That's every dollar spent on roads, schools, clean air, law enforcement, agriculture, energy, etc. And if you cut it all, we'd still have a deficit of more than $100 billion.
So, even if you take into account an improving economy, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on the very wealthy, and the budget freeze already announced by President Obama, we are still in very serious budgetary trouble.
This is the point of David Stockman's revealing op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend. Stockman comes down hard on his party for abandoning their traditional support for common sense, rational, sane governance of living within our national means.
Stockman echoes many of the same points that Kevin Phillips, another long-time Republican who has become intensely critical of the modern Republican Party, has made in his books Wealth and Democracy and American Theocracy. Their voices ring through like a refreshing blast from the past when Republicans actually dealt with reality.
Today's whacked out Republican Party of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and their shock jock talking heads Rush/Beck/Hannity/etc has become so unhinged that even in the era of gargantuan projected deficits, they support continuing the budget busting Bush tax breaks for millionaires.
I would love to watch one of these modern-day Republicans use that online budgeting tool and see what they would do when forced to take this debate out of the realm of cheap talk show rhetoric and to confront the tough reality.
But whether you're a Democrat, Independent, or Republican, our budget deficit is a very serious problem and will require some very serious sacrifice.