There are a lot of absurdities surrounding the debt ceiling talks. But two of the biggest have to be the idea that Republicans are the "radicals" in this particular dance and, unbelievably as it may seem, all of our current fiscal problems are George W. Bush's fault — therefore we must maintain our spending binge with no end in sight, other than some opaque promise to address the issue somewhere down the road.
First, the radicalism. What does such radicalism consist of? Something in writing, aka the Cut Cap and Balance Act. Now one can debate the pros and cons of such a bill. Or they might have, if Harry Reid and his fellow Senate Democrats hadn't voted to table it before such a debate could take place. How could Harry and Company get away with that? Easy. Just call the bill "perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country" as Mr. Reid did, and trust that the communications arm of the Democrat party, more familiarly known as the mainstream media, will faithfully regurgitate that assessment without the slightest examination of the facts.
How radical is CC&B? So radical it would have cut spending for 2012 by all of $111 billion. That's so radical it amounts to less than 7 percent of next year's projected deficit. Not the budget. Just the deficit part of it. the Other radical part? A ten year glide path, reducing government spending from its current 22.5 percent of GDP, down to 19.9 percent in 2021. How radical is that? For the last sixty years, government spending has averaged 18 percent of GDP. Thus, this radical plan still allows the government to continue spending more than it ever has, on average.
There is a truly radical component in this plan, however. At least radical by Washington D.C. standards. These "nutters" actually proposed a Balanced Budget Amendment which would limit spending to a fixed percentage of GDP, unless a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress allowed the ruling class to return to their drunken sailor spending habits.
How whacky is that? According to a CNN poll, "only" 74 percent of Americans think a Balanced Budget Amendment is a good idea. That means only 26 percent would be, as our reliable media refers to them, the only "adults in the room." Of course no one's supposed to notice that the leaders of the Adult Faction, aka Congressional Democrats and president Obama, have yet to put a single proposal of their own in writing, nor has the Democratically-controlled Senate produced a budget in more than two years. Only radicals take responsibility for their actions.
The second component of our adult conversation? Blaming George W. Bush for everything that's gone wrong in the last two-and-a-half years. What is the essence of that blame? Bush — and a Democratically-controlled Congress (the part we're supposed to ignore) — ran the nation's debt up to unprecedented heights. That is, they were unprecedented until Mr. O tripled down on them in a Keynesian economic frenzy to "stimulate" the economy. Thus, the "adults in the room" have come up with one of the more familiar rationalizations of all time to continue spending like there's no tomorrow:
George did it, so why can't we do it too?
Now if that sounds somewhat adolescent to you, it's because you're obviously a radical. Just like three-out-of-four of your fellow American radicals. And if you point out that Mr. Bush did indeed break the bank, but that two wrongs don't make a right, you're some fringe-dwelling moralist in a country where morals went out of fashion along time ago.
So did spending restraints, all of which must be offset by taxes. On the rich. Keep your eye on that word "rich," and trust me when I tell you that it's probably the most fluid word in the English language at the moment. In fact, if there's anything moving in a downward direction at this particular time, it would be the number that defines rich. We started at billionaires, worked our way through millionaires, three-quarter-millionaires, and half-millionaires. The adults in the room are currently dithering between quarter-millionaires and one-fifth-millionaires as to where the draw the line between "rich" and the rest of us.
It's not hard to imagine a time in the not-too-distant future where more than half of America will be ungrateful bastards who don't give a damn about the poor. The road to Social Justice can't be paved strictly with good intentions. Somebody's got to pull the proverbial wagon when more and more people hop on for the ride.
That's what "fairness" is all about — even if the country goes down the tubes in pursuit of it.
