I've missed a lot of the debt ceiling hoo-hah, but I took a moment to read the President's speech this morning. It turns out we're about to eat rancid food while the weather surprises us, assuming that the trucks carrying the rancid food aren't lost when the bridges they drive over crumble beneath them.
We all want a government that lives within its means, but there are still things we need to pay for as a country – things like new roads and bridges; weather satellites and food inspection; services to veterans and medical research.This is sheer idiocy. He's not even trying to make sense any more. His 2010 budget spent $3.4T. If you can't figure out how to keep our dirt roads from washing out for that kind of scratch, you could always just pave them with one dollar bills. As for the satellites, just what in the world does that mean? Are they going to be pulled down from the sky and repo'ed by the Chinese?
Medical research? We're borrowing to do medical research? Maybe if you didn't hunt down companies that made profits and shoot their management teams as an example to others, you wouldn't need the government to pay for medical research.
The speech is really an odd one. The intellectual foundations are fantasy and the cloud gargoyles built upon them are even stranger. The speech writers must have been allowed to make things up as they went along, knowing that he'd say absolutely anything.
What a weird dude.
I don't understand the fixation on raising taxes* either. When we get over our fiscal heads, we don't have the option of cutting spending or getting a raise at work. In the Real World (tm) unknown to our Dear Leader, spending cuts are the only option to fix a budget shortfall**.
ReplyDelete* Yes, I understand the fixation. But it's not rational. When asked why he pursues taxes that he knows won't raise any revenue, the president displays his total disregard for economics and people.
** You could sell assets too, but after the quality investments in Detroit, I don't want to give them ideas.
(exozood)
I love how it's a one-way ladder. Raise spending and borrow to cover it. When it's time to close the deficit, you have to raise taxes, at least a little. It slowly ratchets up the tax burden.
ReplyDeleteBridges.... Bridges! Again, with the freaking bridges!
ReplyDeleteIs there some sort of Freudian connection that I'm missing with respect to statists and bridges. Always with the bridges!
Could we be misinterpreting the word? Is it some kind of oral fixation?
ReplyDeleteAbout the bridges: I don't think there's any "Freudian connection". He just remembers the I-35W Bridge Collapse. Perhaps you recall it? Killed 13 people, cost a few hundreds of millions of dollars in direct damage, disrupted the whole Minneapolis area for over a year?
ReplyDeleteRemember that?
Tim, if you can't keep the thing up for $3.4T, you can't keep it up at all.
ReplyDeleteYeah, about that: The thing that is really ticking me off about this whole business is the way that everybody is pussyfooting around the real issue: If we were to cut every dime of spending on everything other than the military, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and interest payments, we would still have a federal budget deficit of about $218 billion. And that's if we completely zero out everything else!
ReplyDeleteIf we don't cut some combination of Medicare/Medicaid, SS, and Military spending, then at current tax rates we are going to have a deficit, no matter how much they muck and natter around with everything else. Period. And yet even our local State Representative (Dan Benishek, the guy who replaced Bart Stupak, and who says he's part of the "Tea Party"), said during the campaign that he will not even consider any cuts to SS or Medicare (and hasn't said anything about the military budget or Medicaid).
They all know what the problem is. They have to. It's glaringly obvious. The problem is that the obvious solution is political suicide, so the only people who will take it are those who care more about the country than about their own political hides. But they're all too damned scared of losing an election to do what they need to do to fix it. Or too eager to have a disaster happen that they can blame on the other party, in hopes that they can use it to get power in the next election.
What's really cool is to go back about 20 years and see what we spent then, adjusted for inflation. It's like going back to the year 1991 as a baseline budget is going back to the year 1501. Dead bodies everywhere! Polluted water! Ignorant children living in filth! Aaaaauuuuggghhhhh!
ReplyDeleteAin't President Barry just the nuts?
ReplyDelete