Americans are worried about our national debt and agree we need to cut spending, but when the talk gets specific everybody points at everyone else and says “Cut his spending. Leave mine alone.”
That is why nothing that matters will get done until most americans feel the pinch in a very serious way.
“He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy,”
It is not a “fantasy” that current projections of the near future costs and deficits of Social Security and Medicare - entitlements that Grandma and Grandpa are told are their privileged rights - will, beyond any doubt, be painful financial burdens pressed predominately on our children and grandchildren - the working age population.
Maybe she is trying to say that “Americans”, and in that predominately Grandma and Grandpa, do NOT realize, consider or even “imagine” this “pain”, or do not care about it. On any one part of that score, she could be correct; and least in a public majority sense.
So, she could be correct to say that those who need to “imagine” this pain, do not, and therefor an argument based on the facts will not appeal to them. Again, on that score, she could be right, at least as a possible majority of the Grandmas and Grandpas are concerned. They, the baby boomers are the first generation who have worked their entire lives paying into and expecting to get back from the Social Security and Medicare plans.
The truthful, painful, argument is that they can admit that pain - paying 100% of currently projected Medicare and Social Securty costs, will fall MOSTLY on their children and grandchildren - and accept budget-cutting plan changes to soften that blow, or they can stick their heads in the sand WITH the Democrats and demand that nothing change, which will deny their children and grandchildren immediate relief while possibly insuring their eventual release from it all when the plans implode entirely.
The fact is that the “Ryan plan” (as at least one reasoned idea) makes the good and truthful argument about Medicare and its looming deficits and then offers a positive outlook with elements to put more market-based incentives into the plan, and to also quits pretending the plan can continue, as is, without less drastic cuts unless those who can afford to pay more do so; keeping the plan as the safety net that everyone can fall back on as much as they might actually need to.
Then the author goes on to lift up a number of issues that I know are dear to Conservatives (myself included), particularly regarding the Justice Department under Mr. Holder, and foreign policy issues like our dropping support for Britain over the Falklands.
Yet as much as I know those are issues dear to many Conservatives, and correctly so; and as much as I wish everyone of them were an electioneering “barn burner”, I think THAT idea is fantasy - to think that they will resonate strongly enough with a currently very populist general public to be used as more of a core of a GOP POTUS candidate’s campaign, than a focus on our debt and deficits and where they come from.
It seems the RINOs actually do not want the long term deficit issues solved and the structural causes of them - big government and entitlements - reversed. They want to get elected on a platform of behaving like Democrats - distract the people using ANY other issues, kick the can down the road and let those who come later pick up the pieces.
Meanwhile, “later” is already here.
I don’t.
Its that government spending that is consuming the private sector and the jobs it provides.
The sooner people figure that out the sooner we are on the path to actual recovery - with jobs.
LLS
This is no longer a pragmatic argument about HOW MUCH of your money it is right to take, or about whether or not the race of the looters makes a difference.
This is not going to end well.