Note: This article was originally published as a blog comment at the Tea Party Nation website.
This is about the
three S's -- as will soon be made clear.
After Speaker Boehner's repeated criticism of Democrats for wanting merely to "kick the can down the road" on the debt-ceiling/spending-cut crisis, we now know what he really meant:
The Republican leadership has no intention of letting the Democrats "kick the can" 100 miles down the road. The Republican leadership is demanding that the can be kicked no more than 90 miles down the road. This is BUSINESS AS USUAL, but at a reduced pace: reduced from 78 RPM all the way down to 77 RPM.
WOW!!!
The problem is that NO ONE in the Republican Party, not even from amongst the Tea-Party-elected Freshmen, is calling for the correct actions, or properly defining the debate. The issue is being presented to -- and apparently accepted by -- the world as "whether or not to raise the debt ceiling." THIS WAY OF DEFINING IT IS A
GUARANTEE OF FAILURE. The correct labeling of the issue should be "whether or not to
LOWER the debt ceiling
!!!"
Someone needs to re-define the terms of the debate. As long as the argument is over whether and how much the debt ceiling should be RAISED, the GREATEST victory we can hope to win in practice is: preservation of the status quo. We will forever ratchet forward along the business-as-usual road, with POSSIBLE occasional brief pauses, until we're over the precipice.
If we want to return the point where we took this wrong road and get back on the right one instead, then IT'S NOT ENOUGH MERELY TO SLOW OUR CURRENT RATE OF PROGRESS. WE MUST REVERSE DIRECTION TO CORRECT OUR PAST ERRORS. IE, we have to fight for an actual REDUCTION in the debt ceiling, along with tax cuts and spending cuts. We have to cut, cut, . . . AND CUT -- in EVERY area. We can't cut spending and borrowing if we are increasing the debt. That's an arithmetic impossibility. ALL THREE HAVE TO BE CUT TOGETHER. In other words:
WE HAVE TO CHANGE THE TERMS OF THE DEBATE TO HOW MUCH WE'RE GOING TO
LOWER THE DEBT CEILING OVER TIME. RAISING THE DEBT CEILING IS
NOT ON THE TABLE FOR NEGOTIATION --
it logically cannot be, if our stated goal is to reduce spending and the size of government.
We need to REDUCE the
Size,
Scope, and
Spending of our federal gov't. That means REDUCING the debt ceiling, gradually over time, to ZERO. We need to balance the budget and
PAY OFF THE DEBT and run the government on a pay-as-you-go basis as the founding fathers intended. Raising the debt ceiling by smaller amounts, or more slowly, or even keeping it unchanged, will not do the job. The ONLY solution REQUIRES that the debt ceiling ultimately come down -- HARD.
THE NEW SLOGAN OF THE TEA PARTY AND OTHER FISCAL CONSERVATIVES SHOULD BE TO CUT
THE THREE "S"s: CUT the
SIZE,
SCOPE, &
SPENDING.of our Federal Gov't. NOTHING LESS will save our nation.
Can YOU picture our nation some years from now, having actually weathered the current financial/fiscal/economic crisis and yet being larger than it is now? Or having more power over a wider range of our private activities? Or spending at an even wilder pace than today? I can't. I don't think anyone can, except possibly someone with a severe case of schizophrenia. Such results would be logically inconsistent with having weathered and solved our current problems.
We must LOWER the debt ceiling if we are serious about solving our nation's problems.
This MEANS that nothing less than cutting the
SIZE,
SCOPE, &
SPENDING.of the gov't will do. NOTHING less than that is acceptable, because NOTHING LESS than that has a hope of working.
Will SOMEONE please ask the right question -- ie how much can we CUT the debt ceiling? It's the only way we'll have even a hope of getting the right answer out of Washington.
Morry Markovitz——
Bio and Archives
Morry Markovitz is a retired scientist, economist, author and businessman who still actively trades in commodity futures markets.
After completing his formal education in physics at MIT, he took a staff appointment at MIT’s Draper Lab, where the computerized guidance system for NASA’s Apollo Project was developed, and where the countless thousands of computerized flight simulations were carried out in order to perfect, in theory, every detail of the mission—which eventually worked near-perfectly in practice as a result.
Morry later switched professions to economics, taking a position as commodity market analyst for a well-known Wall St. firm—from which he was soon recruited by Commodities Corp (CC) of Princeton, NJ, which became within a few years the acknowledged premiere commodity speculating firm in the world. In the mid-1980s, after becoming Senior Vice President at CC, Morry left that firm. to form his own company on Wall St., Mercury Management Associates, Inc. where he wrote, edited, and published a highly respected and often quoted market letter and also managed private speculative accounts. BARRON’S Magazine called Morry “the thinking man’s trader.” In 1994, Morry broke the Hillary Clinton commodity trading scandal for USA Today.
