It is really difficult to listen to the haranguing amongst the 'so-called leaders' of our country. The media seems to give more time to the Tea Partiers these days. The reasoning behind this decision escapes me but I sure there is one there since MSNBC has been hosting a House Republican Tea Partier nigihtly. Never having been one to suffer fools easily, these interviews have sorely tried my patience and credulity. Some commentators have referred to the Tea in "Tea Party" as the bacronym "Taxed Enough Already"
Today I learned the definition of a backronym. Wikopedia defines it as : "It is constructed by taking an existing word already in common usage, and creating a new phrase using the letters in the word as the initial letters of the words in the phrase. For example, the United States Department of Justice assigns to their Amber Alert program the meaning "America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response," although the term originally referred to Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996".
Amazingly, people who think we are overtaxed seem not to know any math. They do not know that, if the rich shared in taxes proportionately to income as do the poor, we would need to do far less to balance the budget. But alas, their deficiencies allow them to spout off as they they had been annointed by God when they were elected to the House of Representatives.
They are currently professing to be seriously disappointed in President Obama but have no idea just how disappointing they have been to the American public. Instead of coming to Washington to improve the lot of the American people, they march to their own drummer and seem to want to push progress back 40 or more years.
Coping mechanisms are creaking everywhere. They need far more than the political equivalent of WD40.It must be similar when a child sees a parent fly off into a temper tantrum. I will not spout platitudes. I can only say that I hope the current Administration has a plan to.no longer try the patience of the American people with an attempt to compromise with a party that has openly and firmly states they are only interested in having Obama fail and be a one-term president.
Please, let's prove them wrong!
3 comments:
We should not push back 40 years of progress, but I can make the case for pushing back 11 years of regress. In 2000, the last year before Bush and Obama, the total U.S. Federal budget was $1.94 trillion. Adjusting this for inflation (30.46%) and population growth (10.57%), this figure would be a little under $2.8 trillion. So if we adapted the 2000 budget adjusted for inflation and population growth, we would save more money than we would with either Paul Ryan or Barack Obama's plan.
We often hear that any significant cut in our current budget would destroy the economy and harm the poor and elderly. But the economy in 2000, even after the dot-com bust, was better than it is today. The Clinton era was not particularly hard on the poor and elderly. So how did the Feds manage to meet its obligations (and show a surplus!) on a mere $1.94 trillion? Maybe because in 2000, we didn't engage in endless nation building programs. Maybe because Bill Clinton did not bail out large businesses for their failures. In short, a lot of the problem is some very expensive mission creep.
Neither the republican nor the democrats appear to be ready to make the serious cuts needed to restore fiscal sanity, and we are rapidly running out of time. Be prepared for some serious and painful last minute measures in the next few years.
Yes, some cuts are needed but even Greenspan said yesterday that we need to cut the Bush tax cuts out. We have a revenue problem, not just a spending problem. They could cut us to starvation level but it will not stop the bleeding economy.
Simple math shows that our deficit problem cannot be solved without deep spending cuts. George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams, a man who knows a great deal about both economics and about being poor (he was raised in a single family household in a Philadelphia housing project), did a column where he runs the numbers on the "soak the rich" approach to closing the budget gap, and finds that they just don't add up:
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/EatTheRich
So we do need to make significant cuts, especially now that even S&P is downgrading our rating. Fortunately, the 2000 budget shows that we can make the needed cuts without reducing us to starvation.
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