The impasse continues

The Republicans in the House keep pitching them, and the Senate keeps letting them go by. So where is the Democrats’ plan?

It looks like either one of two things will happen: we will go past the so-called deadline of Tuesday or Republicans will cave. I’d prefer the former but it doesn’t take a lot of pressure to make the latter happen, based on previous results.

Personally I’d like the spending cuts now because there’s one big problem with a Balanced Budget Amendment: you would never get it through the Senate given its configuration at the moment. And then to count on 38 states? Not happening.

(I’m not even going to get into the drawbacks to having a budgetary system based on a percentage of GDP. Suffice to say that we lock in profligate spending for perpetuity.)

To balance the budget based on the money we take in presently, we only need to reduce spending to roughly 2003 levels. Scary to think we’ve grown our government over 40 percent in less than a decade, under Presidents and Congresses of both parties.

So why not get to work on that? Sure, it will take some rather draconian cuts but isn’t it all about shared sacrifice? Come to think of it, a consumption tax would do a dandy job of making all of us share, wouldn’t it?

Until we get to that point, though, it’s high time to share the sacrifice all over the non-essential areas of government – leave us overburdened taxpayers alone!

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.