That's stupid and you know it. There is nothing like a Norquist pledge not to decrease spending on the Dem's side. The Dems ARE okay to decrease spending, and all their proposals added a large share of spending cuts to tax rise (Even the progressive caucus and their tax-raising budget wanted deep cuts... in defense).
Also, the view that spending is a far greater problem right now is your opinion. Again, America has no short-term debt problems. People like your debts so much than you can borrow for free or near. What you should be doing is borrow a whole lot of that nearly-free money and use it to invest in infrastructures and educations and other long-term investment.
Spending is hard to cut. I'm not sure America has ever truly cut spending, just the rates of increase in spending. Let's find a chart.
Here it is. Since 1965 at least, annual spending has never been cut significantly. Taxes have been raised, but in point of fact, overall spending has never actually been cut. Certain areas of the budget were scaled back occasionally, but that didn't actually change much. Total spending rose elsewhere to fill the void each time spending cuts were made in one area.
You act like agreeing to spending cuts is the easy part. It's the part that has never been accomplished in modern history. Tax raises at least have a historical precedence. We know that they do happen. We also know that the additional revenues are never sufficient to dent the deficit spending. If tax policy and debt ceiling extensions are agreed before spending cuts, spending cuts will once again slip quietly into oblivion.
Also, investing in infrastructure has uses in less developed countries, where roads and cable are obvious investments, but there simply isn't any more infrastructure development in modern America that can pay back the effort used in building it. High-speed rail loses money. As for building human capital through better education, American education is quite expensive enough, and half the graduates can't get jobs. This is the job market informing people that white-collar work has jumped the shark. We need people who can actually accomplish things other than shuffling papers.
The one thing that can't be denied is we have shitloads of resources that are going to waste for no other reason than big imaginary number game says so. Big imaginary number game needs to either get a lot more generous with what it has under its control or go the fuck away. There's just no practical reason for there to be 3x as many empty homes as homeless people. There's no reason for so many competent and willing people to be unemployed while infrastructure crumbles. If something like a social program to put those wasting things to use is going to break the big imaginary number game because "omg spending"... then fuck it. The game is already broken anyway, and doing more harm than good. All this bickering over the crunchy details of some obviously completely disconnected shit is wasting away unfathomable amounts of potential.
If you've got savings in the bank, that's the imaginary numbers game. Your parents' pensions and 401k investments, also the numbers game. The numbers game vanished in Zimbabwe last year. I don't think the outcome will be to your liking on closer perusal. The numbers game is keeping score; and without a score, people stop participating. The numbers game is why someone who makes food on a farm, a solid line of work in even the worst catastrophe, feels like working an extra hour to feed someone who produces essay papers in a university, a career that has little meaning when the shit hits the fan.