The Wall Street Journal has this excellent piece today on three big problems the next president should deal with: the expiring tax cuts in 2010, the Alternative Minimum Tax, and Medicare.

The right moves, according to the authors, would be to keep the tax cuts, ditch the AMT, and reign in the rampant entitlement spending, of which Medicare is the most dangerous of many programs.

Alas, what I’m afraid we can expect out of our politicians is to let the tax cuts expire while finding new ways to squeeze money out of Americans, to do nothing but a band-aid fix for the AMT, and to let entitlement spending continue to grow. As a result, a rapidly increasing percentage of GDP will be gobbled up by Washington and the economy will correspondingly slow to a crawl. We could be looking at times so bad that the years under Jimmy Carter will look good in comparison.