(Fred Weinberg/The Penny Press) – As you read this—assuming Washington was only engaging in its normal misdirection as opposed to outright lies—the Federal Government is still operating.
And the compromise is that out of a $3.8 Trillion (with a T) budget the Tea Party was able to push the conventional Republicans into forcing $38.5-Billion (with a B) in budget cuts for the rest of the fiscal year.
Allow me to put that into perspective.
That’s 1.04 percent.
You’ll hear words like, “it takes five miles to start an aircraft carrier into a turn” but the fact is that is the same thing as a 4.16 cent discount on a $4.00 gallon of gas.
It’s a little more than lunch money in the Congressional dining room, but not that much.
These clowns actually think that the public thinks a billion dollars is such an incomprehensible amount of money we will buy into the concept that they are actually doing something.
They’re wrong.
The only guy who has the right idea is House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan who has put forth a plan to cut $4.4-Trillion from the deficit over a relatively short period of 10 years. His plan attacks Obamacare and Medicare. People who are under 55 would pay more for their healthcare after they turn 65. This would be accomplished by, essentially, privatizing Medicare. The government would pay private insurers fixed rates to do what the government now does itself.
Additionally, Ryan would repeal Obamacare saving about $725-billion from the subsidies the government was going to have to pay people who would have been forced to purchase insurance.
Other provisions of the Ryan budget plan involve lowering tax rates to spur investment and eliminating special interest carve-outs such as energy and agriculture subsidies.
Now those are serious numbers. As the late Senator Everett Dirkson once said, “A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
The Democrats hate them and many Republicans aren’t too happy with the ideas either.
But thanks to Ross Perot’s 1992 and 1996 candidacies, the American public now knows that our current national debt and trade deficits are not sustainable.
A wise Republican Party would stop kissing China’s rear end and suggest to that nation that they really only have two choices. One is to keep things the way they are now. The trade deficit which we are allowing them to stack up will continue and we will continue to owe them more and more money. Eventually, our money will become worth less and less because of inflation. So, we’ll be happy to pay them back because we’ll pay off a Trillion dollars with money worth about $200-Billion.
Or, they could decide to end the trade deficit and buy more stuff from us which will not only be good for their economy but a jolt to ours.
Short of them attacking Pearl Harbor (and how did that work out for Japan?) those are really the only two alternatives.
Our problems are really more internal.
That we could have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President and no budget tells you exactly how broken Washington is.
Our real problem is a lack of solid candidates for Federal office on both sides.
Many of the members of the House and Senate are people who could never hold a real job in the private sector.
And people like Ross Perot or Donald Trump come along once in a generation.
Real business people—who probably could make a difference—simply don’t want to join the circus.
So we send well intentioned but completely ineffective people to Washington instead.
And now, after years of watching people like Harry Reid run the Senate and the House, we are reaping the rewards.
If you want to fix the problem, find people who are willing to cut more than 1.04% from the budget. Their political persuasion doesn’t really matter.
