After a near miss on a plane
You swear you'll never fly again
After the first kiss when you make up
You swear you'll never break up again
And when you've just run a red light
Sit shaking under the street light
You swear to yourself you'll never drink and drive again
“Four Minutes”
by
Roger Waters
Unfortunately, as a savvy consumer of the media (having
my formal training in Broadcasting and thirty years in the industry) I can only
feign surprise at the way that the media is talking about the recently averted
financial crisis. They keep talking about how closely we avoided driving off
the cliff, how we avoided the worst of it, etc. It has all the sincerity and
accuracy of Maxwell Smart saying that he “…missed it by that much!” (…while
holding his thumb and forefinger practically touching in front of his eye, indicating
some minute amount.)
The problem is that we didn’t miss it… we have simply
backed up to take a running start at it – at least, that is what is apparent
from the news coverage. The small faction of the far-right margin of the
Republican Party that wanted to shutdown the government still want to do this.
Asked what the lesson of the recent multi-billion dollar waste of time and
money was, the TEA Party does not tell you that it was a waste of time and
money – but that it has gotten us talking. Have they not been listening? We
have been talking for years.
We have told them ‘no’ over forty-some times. No, you
cannot stop the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from taking effect.
It is the law of the land and the fact that you have been against it is now
simply an academic oddity. Senator Cruz of Texas has gone so far as to say that
the strategy was a fundamentally good one and that the problem with it was that
we didn’t go far enough. What!? Really!?
“Yes, officer I have been drinking, but the reason I almost got in an accident is that I am not quite intoxicated enough.”
Part of the problem is that we have this stupid thing
called the debt ceiling. It is a completely fictitious concept which is as unenforceable
in concept as it is in reality. Theoretically, it keeps us from over-spending
by preventing the president from borrowing to pay the bills. In reality, it
does no such thing. It simply makes the markets and the rest of the world
nervous while degrading the “full faith and credit of the U. S. Government” to
be as meaningless on our money as “Fair And Balanced” is when applied to Fox
News.
The problem is not the borrowing to pay the bills, the
problem is running-up the bills in the first place. This fighting over the debt
ceiling is somewhat akin to the argument that if you just file-away the bills
un-opened when they come in, you can run-up as much as you want on your
plastic. (Try that for a while and see how those good folks at MasterCard
react.) Besides
Besides, the president is compelled to spend the money
that congress authorizes under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control
act. So, the problem is that Congress spends too much. The way to fix this is
not to refuse to pay the bills but to quit running-up the bills in the first
place.
Which leaves us with this dangerous fiction; this
loaded weapon that has been left-out where the children are playing. The TEA
Party seems to be intent on using the debt ceiling as a cudgel again so, let’s
remove it! Senator Mitch McConnell has been floating an idea for a few years
now to solve the debt ceiling issue by simply removing the debt ceiling! Doing
so would make it so that the TEA Party could still hurt the country but not the
world by crashing the markets.
And right now, there’s only about a hundred days before
they get their next chance to be drunk-in-charge again. Quick, hide the keys!
Wherever you are today, I hope that you’ll spend at
least a moment in sober contemplation.
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