Members of congress are today congratulating themselves for averting a national crisis(assuming the Senate votes yes), but what have they really accomplished by passing this debt deal? The Congressional Budget Office calculates that the annual spending deficit is now at a staggering $1.5Trillion. In this debt-ceiling bill, there are $1.4Trillion in spending cuts.....over then next 10 years. That only comes to $140Billion a year for those of you who were having your self-esteem stroked in 5th grade instead of learning simple division.
I'm no math whiz, but $140Billion a year in cuts when we're spending over ten times that over what we take in each year is not exactly making progress toward fiscal responsibility.
Imagine that our economy is a bus being driven by Congress and we're barreling toward a cliff at 100mph. This bill doesn't apply the brakes and back us away from the cliff as feckless politicians will claim at election time. It just slows our rate of travel to 90mph, but we're still headed over the edge. This is why our credit rating should be downgraded....we're clearly not serious about fiscal responsibility.
Lost in all the hoopla and self-congratulatory reveling in Congress is that the spending cuts are all back loaded so that no constituencies get seriously cut heading into the 2012 election. The three things you can always count on in life are death, the sun rising in the east, and self-serving politicians always looking toward the next election when writing legislation. They should be ashamed.
2 comments:
The concepts of the "Self-licking Ice Cream Cone" and "Kicking the Can Down the Street" come to mind. Not much was accomplished, at least not much important.
I wonder if there is a analogy here for anti-lock braking technology?
I think the term is "turd sandwich".
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