So let me get this straight: this group of elite Congress people could not do any better of a job doing what the rest of Congress has also been proven to be terrible at: compromise in the face of obvious need of it. In short, the Dems in Congress won't cut payments on crap we can't afford, and the GOP won't let us collect money to pay for the stuff we already bought. Lovely. And that was just an attempt to cut $1.2 trillion over the next decade....which still wouldn't even get us NEAR a balanced budget. They couldn't even agree how to slow the hemorrhaging.
Not surprising as ideological everyone's become, starting with the Republicans. This guy sure isn't helping. He explicitly wants us to go back to the early 1900s when the government was below 10 percent of GDP. By the way, life expectancy was also below 50, industrial jobs were brutal jobs with slave wages and hours, kids left school to go to work at around 13, blacks weren't people, politics were rife with corruption, and the gap between rich and poor was astronomical as most Americans lived much harsher lives than any do today. So perhaps he's over romanticized this glorious era free of big government. If someone could name a modern, comfortable, first world country with that little government I'd love to hear about it.
The historic evidence doesn't mean all efforts to shrink government are wrong, but it does indicate that ideological rigidity isn't going to solve anything.
It seems that his side (and to a lesser extent Democrats, too) think they can wait for the other party to be completely out of power, as if either party was appealing enough to win the White House, Senate and House in 2012. And when they remain split, of course, they'll probably push everything to the next election. Or the next economic crisis, which would probably precede it.
I will make my oft-repeated, obligatory mention here that the rigged districts that representatives occupy after horse trading leads to polarized partisan politics that make compromise more difficult, as centrists largely have no seat at the table. Although this super-committee was senators (where this isn't a problem) there is still a trickle down effect where the tone of discussion in other elements of political discourse guides party-wide and nation-wide discussion to that of vitriolic, unyielding debate where both sides tend to miss the point entirely.
On the grounds that I have to go do other things and that this is another one of those topics that can make me so angry that my brain stops working.
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