The president just negotiated a $900 billion tax cut and spending bill, all of which will add to the deficit and debt, with the republicans who said that they just won a majority in the house because the voters want less spending; no more deficits and, hopefully, a plan to start repaying the debt. Mr. Obama’s party members are pretentiously claiming a bad deal. Is anyone buying this charade? Does anyone give oscars to politicians for acting like they’re getting a bad deal when they can’t believe their lucky stars that they not only got this deal but they got it from the republicans who should be totally opposed to this deal? The same republicans who are going to have to explain to their supporters for the next two years why they passed a $900 billion dollar additional borrowing program a few weeks after they got the vote to do the exact opposite?
This is puerile, sophomoric and downright inexcusable DC drama that suggests a growing divide between the responsible citizenry and the irresponsible governance group. We don’t know what the founders meant when they said that elected officials could be thrown out of office for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But if this kind of irresponsible behavior and fiscal promiscuity does not meet any reasonable persons definition of “misdemeanor” then just what the heck is a misdemeanor?
The democrats will ride this thing as far as they can railing against the tax cuts for the high earners and act as if they are looking out for the country and the middle class and so appear to be the real heroes and then, at the last minute, they will vote for it with just enough votes to pass it. Their follow-up comments will be that we really didn’t want this deal with all these high end tax cuts but we had to do it for you. A $900 billion boondoggle that the democrats don’t want? Who writes their bad scripts?
Now here is the other, and perhaps dominant, travesty of this phenomenally fiscally promiscuous deal for the country. Will someone point out one republican who says, “No” to this deal? “We can’t afford it. Already we have too much deficits; too much debt. Time to buck up and focus on spending cuts and not add to the deficits with tax cuts.” Where are the republicans who could not say enough about spending cuts and deficit reductions five weeks ago? Where did they go? Did they lose that script?
So, here is TheFundamentals bottom line. There is no way the democrats will let this bill not pass. What we can’t believe is that there should be no way that the republicans will let this bill pass. So, what you hear/see from the democrats is pure theatre; designed to reinvigorate a defeated party that has no record of accomplishment and has a spectacular record of financial failure. Horrible results from trillions wasted. Horrible jobs numbers. A horrible and still declining competitive record in commerce, education and health care. It is all smoke, mirrors and Hollywood digital effects. It portends poorly for the future.
What we want to know is where are the republicans who should be railing against this bad deal? Is this what we can expect from Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell? If so we are lost. It is exactly the opposite of what they should be fighting for. If the republicans would do their job, the one they just go elected majority to do, then the democrats would have to put on a real fight. Not a scripted fight. Then we could start to measure whether we will ever bring fiscal responsibility and sanity to this country. Then we could determine where the cuts will fall. How the burdens will be shared. Then we could see a favorable future.
The responsible citizenry want an end to this foolishness. The politicians and bureaucrats cannot push their bloated stomachs away from the table; they cannot remove the needle from their arm; they cannot empty the whisky bottle down the drain. They are hopelessly lost in the addiction of fiscal promiscuity.
If elections don’t break this addiction and these horrible consequences, what else is there?
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