The Disgrace That Is Washington - A Quick Rant

I had not expected to blog this week, given visiting friends, family and Thanksgiving. I also wanted  to take a break from the sickness and disgrace that is the political class in Washington. However, given another failure by the political class, this time the failure of the Congressional "Super" Committee to come up with a coherent deficit reduction plan, I have to speak up.

First, though, let me apologize up front. I try to run a fact based, logical, forward looking blog. I hate it when bloggers use their blog to rant and rave only about their opinions, without facts or data or logic to back up their points of view. Personal rants and emotion-based blogs do nothing to address the underlying problems and crises facing the nation today.

Only by carefully understanding the underlying root causes of our problems and using all available information and data to apply against them for a solution, can we hope to have a passionate but sound approach to problem solving.

However, I may not be as logical and unemotional tonight as I strive to be and so I apologize up front for what might degenerate into a rant.

A few facts up front:

• Since Democrats Pelosi and Reid took over Congress in early 2007, joined by Democrat Barack Obama as President in 2009, the Washington political class has added almost $7 TRILLION to our national debt in less than five years. Up until that point, every other President COMBINED had accumulated only $8.4 TRILLION in debt.
• President Obama's long term budget plan that he submitted to Congress in the spring predicted that the Washington political class would add another $9 TRILLION to the national debt in the next ten years.
• Last week our national debt exceed $15 TRILLION.
• Thus, the track that these three Democrats have put us on as a nation would bring us to a national debt of over $24 TRILLION in ten years. This is the equivalent of a debt load of over $200,000 for EVERY American household.

Obviously, we will never reach $24 TRILLION in debt because the economy will crash and the nation will by destroyed long before we reach the end of the ten years.

And what do our politicians talk about? They cannot even get together to reduce the deficit by $1.2 TRILLION OVER TEN YEARS, the objective of the Super Committee. A pathetic, disgraceful effort. It is my understanding that the following is behind the failure:

• The Super Committee has not met as a group since November 1. How did they expect to do any work by not constantly meeting? They should have been locked away in a remote site until they got the real job done, the real job being defined as more than a paltry $1.2 TRILLION, an amount they could not even get to.
• This country has a spending issue, it does not have a "revenue" issue. You cannot solve this problem, or even come close to solving it, by raising taxes on the rich.
• We have reported many times in this blog that even if you confiscated the total wealth of the richest 400 Americans, you would reduce the deficit by less than 10% over the next ten years. Since nobody has suggested that we do that, or anything close to that, raising taxes on the rich will produce significantly less than a 10% reduction in debt.
• However, the Democrats insisted that taxes be raised and would not budge from their initial $1 TRILLION tax increase proposal, no compromise at all. The Republicans started with a no tax pledge, proposed a tax increase in $320 billion and the Democrats rejected it out of hand, refusing to negotiate. As a result of their intransigence, there is no Super Committee agreement..
• President Obama was nowhere to be found in this process over the past few months, but not too busy to campaign all around the country and play some serious golf. Talk about a lack of leadership.
• Obama just came on television tonight to speak about the failure and he is basically of no use. He blamed the Republicans for the failure, despite the fact that he has added more to the budget deficit and national debt in less than three years than any other President, EVER. Again, even if the Super Committee agreed to the outrageous $1 TRILLION increase in taxes, that would account for only about 4% of the $24 TRILLION national debt track we are on.
• I know of no way to say this gracefully, but the President does "misspeak." He claims that the majority of Americans favor increased taxes to balance the budget but we reported last week on a recent Reason magazine opinion poll that shows that is not true. The President says all kinds of economists say we need to raise taxes but that is also not true. Any fourth grader, never mind an economist, can tell we have a government spending problem, we do not have an under taxation problem.
• Two years ago, the President himself said that we should never raise taxes in a recession or poor economy, it makes no sense. If it made no sense two years ago. it makes no sense now. A few weeks ago, ex-President Clinton said no taxes should ever be raised when the economy is so weak. Did President Obama read those news reports?

In a total attempt to avoid blame for not getting government spending under control, Democratic members of Congress blamed Grover Norquist for the failure of the Super Committee. Mr. Norquist is not an elected official, he was not a member of the Super Committee, he is not the President of the United States, to my knowledge he has never held public office. He runs a conservative think tank that is against raising taxes in the face of excessive and wasteful government spending. Rather than accept the fact that Congress and the political class failed miserably to rein in spending, they blame a single, unelected American for their failure. How gutless can you be?


Did it have to come to this? Politics being used by both sides of the political class to kill the nation via excessive spending? A lot of smart Americans know how to do this job because they know how to solve problems and do a little math analysis, skills that are obviously lost on the people in Washington:

1. Obama had a commission that did an excellent job of finding ways to reduce spending and reducing the national debt by TRILLIONS of dollars. He chose to completely ignore their fine work.
2. The Cato Institute has gone through the Federal budget line by line and has come up with their own plan to reduce excessive government spending by TRILLIONS of dollars.
3. The Tea Party has come up with their own plan to get spending under control with TRILLIONS of dollars in expense reductions, which it tried to present to Congress last week but were denied access to Congressional members to make their presentation.
4. The Concord Coalition has come up with a comprehensive plan to reduce excessive government spending by TRILLIONS of dollars.
5. If I had some time, I could list at least another three sources who have already done the hard work in reducing excessive and wasteful spending and I will do that by combing through past posts if anyone is interested.
6. Using these above sources, in the spring I came up with over $6 TRILLION of expense cuts based on the above work. These cuts did not have a substantial impact on most ordinary Americans including the poor, the elderly, and the needy.

No matter how you cut it, this is a disgrace. The stock market took a major hit today and it is probably a good bet that the nation's credit rating is going to take another hit. All because every politician in Washington, from the President down to the freshmen in Congress need to be shamed into oblivion at the next election. They are are so worried about their personal political careers that they are incapable of showing any kind of courage or sanity when it comes to getting government spending under control.

At $15 TRILLION, we, as a nation, do not have much time left. We are officially a leaderless nation right now, the people in the White House and Congress are without a doubt, incapable of governing efficiently, wisely, and unselfishly.

We are about to waste another year of a leaderless government with the scavengers in Congress and the White House busy collecting their campaign funds and planning their continued reign over a sinking ship. We need a new crew that will right the ship, fix the spending leaks, and send Obama, Reid, Pelosi, the Super Committee and the rest of them out to sea and retirement in a life boat.

Sorry if this comes off as a rant, I promise to do better in the future of sticking to facts and logic. But I am convinced we are currently leaderless and that scares the life out of me.