I haven’t posted many political things recently since I tend to fall into the camp that prefers “sanity” in my political discourse and there seems to be precious little of that in most discussions…
Nevertheless, I just read in this CNN article what I’d consider to be a nice Moment Of Clarity. As such—expect it to be ignored uniformly.
Here it is from David Stockman:
[W]e are collecting less than 15% of GDP in taxes, the lowest since 1950, and spending 24% of GDP.
We’ve got to move in both directions—no two ways around it.
Now Derek, let’s not get all reasonable, much less logical, on our politicians of both parties. I have to say I don’t trust any of the stats on news networks anymore, so is there a place that gives honest stats of this sort. Both our pols and the so-called fourth estate spin those into many webs that do not give an accurate picture.
But I do know that the sort of Republican I could vote for, so-called California or New England Republicans, you know, the fiscally responsible balance (which requires careful spending and yes, some taxes) the budget sort who is honest enough to recognize we have always lived in a mixed economy, who recognizes that humans are prone to not thinking of others and markets are not entirely self-regulating so some smart regulation is a conservative measure, who is socially moderate to liberal but thoughtful on changes in culture, and who believes in a safety net as part of the common good (indeed necessary if folks are to maintain any sense of respect for a market economy) is a thing of the past. And the Dems aren’t a replacement.
My proposal is to insist that the Republicans raise enough revenue to fund (say) Bush’s last budget, and then the Democrats make cuts to meet it. It won’t ever happen that way, because for whatever reason the Republicans are far more committed to holding taxes down than to actually doing something about the deficit.
It’ rather depressing that, though I used to be more in sympathy with the Republican than the Democratic party tenets, their rock-headed intransigence has turned me almost completely against them. The FAA debacle is a perfect example: they threw away more revenue in a week than their cuts could have possibly saved in a year.