More than anything else, I consider myself a relatively detached observer, especially when it comes to politics. Yes, I have my own beliefs on how things should be done but since it doesn't fall completely into one camp or another, I try to not get too caught up in the wave of public opinion. This election cycle, I'm actually quite interested in how the Tea Party backed folks headed to Washington are going to make their promises of reform work. Here's a link to President Obamas 2011 budget proposal broken down into nice little pieces. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html
Now what I want to know is, where specifically are they going to make these massive cuts and how are they going to get their fellow Republicans to go along with it? For every piece of the budget, you have a constituency that relies on it in one way or another. Do away with any piece of it and you instantly have a new voting bloc that will form against you. Social Security and Medicare, touch any of that and you risk losing the elderly vote. Cut defense spending and you bring down the wrath of the establishment and their defense contractor lobbyists.
The truth of the matter is that by differentiating themselves from the rest of the party, they have created enemies and set themselves up for failure in the long run. There's simply not enough of them to fight the Democrats and their own party. Just as they rode in on a wave, there will be a wave that will sweep them out in 2 years because of the Catch 22 situation they will find themselves in.
This is an astute observation. It may very well end up being the case and this is evidence that Entitlements are deadly to our country. Once in place there is no political way out side of a Political Kamikaze mission to get rid of them. If you look at France and the UK you will see the political right HAVING to put the fiscal plane into a dive because they have gotten so top heavy that the whole thing is threatening collapse. Once you create a handout addict, where do you send them for treatment? Yesterday I went into a Dollar General to buy some ink pens and a soda. There was a woman in line wearing her PJs at 12:30 pm. She had a basket full of snack foods/party foods. Sodas, cookies, crackers, etc. She smiles and hands over her Foodstamp card and then proceeds out to her 2009 model 25K car. How will you get this woman to vote for something like Middle Class tax breaks at the expense of a "Social (disease) Program", that benefits her? See Manny, Democrats have also found themselves in a catch 22 situation. This top heavy promise laden agenda is not going to ignore the laws of physics too much longer. Eventually it will crash. How many real Green Jobs have they really created? Who is really going to fund Single Payer Healthcare once this bill destroys the free enterprise? Once the Unions own the industries, who will be able to afford the price of their pensions attached to the cost of everything? See, really, the things that are important to Democrats often are extremely short sighted, as if they think that some how in the future we will figure out a new way to pay for all of this... sure their opposition will be the bad guy/boogey man but if there is no one willing to be the bad guy and hit the reset button, it will all collapse any ways. Brush up on your Mandarin.
ReplyDeleteThe success of the Chinese economy is that the worker is expendable. Lax regulations and everything else allows industry to boom but at what cost? The wheels of their machine is oiled with the blood of the workers.
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