Oh, Goldilocks. If you only knew how much you were needed in this big, bad budget fight. Cuz one of the budgets is, to paraphrase your wise words, just too damn loony (courtesy of Paul Ryan), one just leaves anyone who wants a sane society feeling a bit cold (thank you Sen. Patti Murray) but one is just right (a big bow for the Congressional Progressive Caucus).

I already wrote yesterday about the loony Ryan budget. As for the other two offerings, Citizens for Tax Justice gives us the analysis:

There are many good things to say about Senator Murray’s plan, in that it calls for badly needed tax increases and better-designed spending cuts to replace the sequestration (the scheduled cuts of over $1.2 trillion over the decade).

The Murray plan also makes the case for more revenue, explaining that the projected current law revenue is lower, as a percentage of GDP, than it was during the last five times the budget was balanced (going all the way back to 1969). It also explains that the level of revenue it envisions is still less than was proposed in the Simpson-Bowles plan and the other plans that lawmakers calling themselves “centrists” claim to admire.

But the Murray plan does not specify what tax increases or spending cuts would be acceptable. The plan says it would raise revenue by “closing loopholes and cutting wasteful spending in the tax code that benefits the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations,” which is certainly moving in the right direction for those of us who believe that the overall tax system is not asking very much from wealthy individuals or from corporations.

And:

The CPC plan addresses all of these issues, repealing the enormously regressive capital gains tax preference and closing several loopholes used to avoid taxes on capital gains, repealing “deferral” and explicitly rejecting a territorial system, introducing new tax brackets for high-income individuals and many very specific proposals that have been championed by Citizens for Tax Justice. No one will agree with every provision in the CPC budget plan, but it is certainly a plan for people who want to have substantive discussions about what Congress should actually do.

The plan’s list of tax provisions range from huge (raising over a trillion dollars by ending far more of the Bush tax cuts than were allowed to expire under the fiscal cliff deal) to small (ending the Facebook stock options loophole) to very small (eliminating write-offs for corporate jets).

The Progressive Caucus plan would build a better, fairer society. Which, of course, in the current political environment with people from the president to Republicans obsessing about a non-existent debt crisis, means it will never get passed.