From Thomas Sowell at townhall.com
…Just a week before the budget deal was made at the eleventh hour, it looked like the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives had scored a victory by getting the President and the Congressional Democrats to give up the idea of raising the tax rates -- and to cut spending instead. But now that the details are coming out, that "victory" looks very temporary, if not illusory.
The price of getting that deal has been having the Republicans agree to sitting on a special bipartisan Congressional committee that will either come to an agreement on spending cuts before Thanksgiving or have the budgets of both the Defense Department and Medicare cut drastically.
Since neither side can afford to be blamed for a disaster like that, this virtually guarantees that the Republicans will have to either go along with whatever new spending and taxing that the Democrats demand or risk losing the 2012 election by sharing the blame for another financial disaster.
In short, the Republicans have now been maneuvered into being held responsible for the spending orgy that Democrats alone had the votes to create. Republicans have been had -- and so has the country. The recent, short-lived budget deal turns out to be not even a Pyrrhic victory for the Republicans. It has the earmarks of a Pyrrhic defeat.
[I wrote days ago that Obama had once again outsmarted our RINOs with the debt resolution plan that did almost nothing, and with more political smarts. Until the RINOs realize that compromise simply makes them look more and more like democrats, that compromise shows their weakness, they shouldn’t be surprised that the public views them negatively. The public wants to see someone truly trying to fix the problems, not gloss them over and kick them down the road with a bunch of empty rhetoric. In other words, the public wants to see some strength, not weakness. Get some balls, RINOs! – JS]
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Unfortunately it's defense and and medicare among others that need to be cut drastically. Defense because we are defending an ever enlarging empire created by our politicians to spend our money and our lives while they enjoy the trappings that such power brings; and medicare, because it is impossible for the government, which only can tax those of us who earn money today, to pay for all of us to live for ever. Each of us has had to have saved that amount, whatever it might be, that allows us to live longer and maybe better.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately most of us were not trained to be productive workers, who also learned how to learn, and learned how to change, and are as a result unproductive and unemployable today except by the government, who cares nothing about efficiency and effectivity, but about votes to win.
It is also unfortunate that our politicians instead of setting about to fix the problems they created by meddling in the nature of things, without realizing there would be unintended consequences for all they did, now spend their time blaming each other, while knowing that people in both parties committed the mistakes.