Reid said the Senate will not take up an amended bill. Why would he cave? So
we go over and stay over? And we go back into recession? Swell. To me that is like a suicide bomber. You are saying to hell with all of it, to hell with America. If we don’t get what we want then lets blow it all to pieces and ourselves with it because we are screwed no matter what. At least everyone else will suffer too.
That’s whacked! We must live, so we can fight another day. This is not the hill to die on.
So we go over the cliff and have another recession. At least with everyone returning to the days of the Clinton tax rates, we will get in more revenue thus reducing the deficit. The American people need something to focus on our out of control spending and the cost of the welfare state. Paying more in taxes will bring it home that we can't continue on our present course.
Mark Steyn wrote this:
You cannot simultaneously enjoy American-sized taxes and European-sized government. One or the other has got to go.
speech warnings that we were on a one-way ticket to Continental-sized dependency, chortled to me, "Americans love Big Government as much as Europeans. The only difference is that Americans refuse to admit it."
My Gallic charmer is on to something. According to the most recent (2009) OECD statistics: Government expenditures per person in France, $18,866.00; in the United States, $19,266.00. That's adjusted for purchasing-power parity, and, yes, no comparison is perfect, but did you ever think the difference between America and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys would come down to quibbling over the fine print? In that sense, the federal debt might be better understood as an American Self-Delusion Index, measuring the ever-widening gap between the national mythology (a republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens) and the reality (a 21st century cradle-to-grave nanny state in which, as the Democrats' Convention boasted, "government is the only thing we do together.").
Generally speaking, functioning societies make good-faith efforts to raise what they spend, subject to fluctuations in economic fortune: Government spending in Australia is 33.1 percent of GDP, and tax revenues are 27.1 percent. Likewise, government spending in Norway is 46.4 percent, and revenues are 41 percent – a shortfall but in the ballpark. Government spending in the United States is 42.2 percent, but revenues are 24 percent – the widest spending/taxing gulf in any major economy.
So all the agonizing over our annual trillion-plus deficits overlooks the obvious solution: Given that we're spending like Norwegians, why don't we just pay Norwegian tax rates?
No danger of that. If (in Milton Himmelfarb's famous formulation) Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans, Americans are taxed like Puerto Ricans but vote like Scandinavians. We already have a more severely redistributive taxation system than Europe, in which the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans pay 70 percent of income tax while the poorest 20 percent shoulder just three-fifths of 1 percent. By comparison, the Norwegian tax burden is relatively equitably distributed. Yet Obama now wishes "the rich" to pay their "fair share" – presumably 80 percent or 90 percent. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in The New York Times this week, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion. That sounds like a lot, and once upon a time it was. But today, if you confiscated every penny the Forbes 400 have, it would be enough to cover just over one year's federal deficit. And after that you're back to square one. It's not that "the rich" aren't paying their "fair share," it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.
That’s whacked! We must live, so we can fight another day. This is not the hill to die on.
The GOP likes to postpone the fight. It was the same rationale for caving in 2010 and 2011. Now we will supposedly fight on raising the debt limit. I doubt that will happen as our "leaders" will find another excuse why it is not the right time.
This country may literally have just two to three years to address our fiscal problems before it is too late. Now is the time to fight. This goes beyond partisan politics. It is a matter of national survival. A recession pales in comparison to what a true debt crisis may bring. We are bankrupt. We are running trillion dollar annual deficits. A return to historical interest rates could result in up to a trillion dollars a year in just debt servicing costs. SS has been in the red since 2010 and Medicare since 2008. With 10,000 people a day retiring for the next 20 years, things will get worse not better. The longer we wait to address these problems, the more draconian the solutions. Regardless, there is going to be plenty of pain to solve our problems.
Finally, in terms of the Senate plan, which contains plenty of pork and new spending in over 100 pages, we will need to pass it to find out what is in it. Obama and the Dems always use this tactic of waiting until the last minute and making it seem like the world will come to an end if we don't pass a certain piece of legislation. It was done with the healthcare bill as well as with the sequestration deal.
The Senate has already gone home leaving the House with a piece of crap that increases the deficit by $330 billion in 2013 and will add, by itself, another $4 trillion to the debt over ten years. Are Reps to sign off on such a deal and tell the people who voted for them to F-off. I will not vote for an Rep who signs off on this deal and work to get them defeated, The GOP is destroying its base, which is the real objective of Obama's tactics and his push to tax the rich.