As Mr. Obama made his comments at the announcement of the pay freeze, the bipartisan commission he established in February to propose ways to reduce the growth of the national debt entered a final two days of negotiations over combinations of spending cuts and revenue increases. In a sign of the struggle to find a compromise that could attract Democratic and Republicans votes, the commission chairmen — Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine B. Bowles, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton — decided to meet privately with members one at a time on Monday and Tuesday instead of convening all 18 members.The Republicans on the panel are generally opposed to raising taxes and the Democrats to big changes in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The above emboldened words illustrate the stupidity of Washington. Simply put there is no way to balance the budget without two things happening: taxes going up and some kind of compromise on health care spending. There is just no way for meaningful change to happen without both parties compromising on their key issues. So, expect the problem to continue.
3 comments:
To reiterate, they're representing their constituents. That's many things, but it's not stupid.
It's beyond the scope of this blog, but I wonder if there's anything we can do on the cultural level to reverse this behavior of voters electing people to gut the country for them. Behaving like a spoiled child has too good an RoI these days.
Well, Social Security is paid for by Trust Funds (which some don't really want to pay back after borrowing) so it's got little to do with the deficit.
Where's the Defense spending cuts? Oh yeah, that $1 trillion item wasn't even allowed to be talked about.
Phil, to be fair, I think defense cuts are included in the Bowles-Simpson proposal. Maybe they could be more significant, though.
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