There’s a theme that I’m hearing sounded with increasing frequency—that the budget passed by the House, the budget proposed by the Progressive Caucus, and the budget (more of the template of a budget, actually) proposed by President Obama last week are steps in a negotiation. Courtesy of John Taylor here’s the problem with the negotiation:
If your definition of compromise is one in which the two parties, i.e. the Administration’s February budget and the Ryan budget passed by the House, meet in the middle, that doesn’t get us anywhere near where we need to go.
Fifty years ago an American president, who had been one of the leaders who had brought victory at a time of grave national crisis, warned of the political and economic forces that would make a return to the pre-crisis America difficult or impossible. Then as now many politicians are doing their damnedest to make sure that the conditions necessitated by the crisis become permanent. If they’re successful some people will become very, very wealthy while most of us will find it increasingly difficult simply to get by.
I really don’t get this idea that “meeting in the middle” blindly, irrespective of outcome, is compromise. The right and left have their favored methods of balancing the budget, compromise would be borrowing from tools from each box, to balance the budget.
Obviously someone trustworthy needs to run the math on each iteration. If the CBO is still filling that role, we’re pretty lucky. Without them, it would be completely lie vs. lie.
This, of course, is the position I’ve taken for years. Dave, you assume the negotiation is “in between.” Heh. With the left, the negotiation is “if you go even close to 5% off our proposal we’ll paint you as evil, child and elderly killing mongrels.”
Meanwhile we have reality: the spending curve is out of control, total taxation increases, when political (and probably economic) reality sets in we borrow instead of tax – but that’s reaching its limits, the left squeals irrationally at any notion of spending reduction……..truth comes out, like public workers pensions etc…..and the public is waking up and saying WTF?
The can has been kicked down the road……but at the end of the road is a wall, and its coming fast.