House Republicans agreed to extend the debt limit without holding the nation's credit hostage. I suppose we should all be thankful for that, but lost in that little bit of encouraging news is all the bleakness underneath, the debt limit ceiling showdown that wasn't has given way to the budget and sequestration battle that will soon be as our elected officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, perform another sobering and embarrassing political dance while the nation waits for the policy that neither side is willing or able to produce.
Both sides deserve the increasing ire of the American people though I suppose we need to blame the collective (wo)man in the mirror since we put these clowns in office.
On the one hand, Republicans have some good ideas which have been co-opted by extremists, and while they have produced budgets in the past, the plans they have offered have been so unbelievably bad it's hard to fathom someone who actually loved America - or was capable of basic math - could support them. Paul Ryan's "plan" is the closest to credibility Republicans have come, but even his plan didn't hold up to scrutiny, and was nothing put a feeble attempt to lower taxes for the rich by cutting spending on everything else. Ultimately it made the deficit bigger rather than smaller.
On the other hand, Democrats don't even have a plan to be co-opted. They've simply refused to come up with a budget blueprint, instead pretending that we can just go on spending and borrowing indefinitely. Democratic priorities are not as horribly misaligned as Republican priorities, but what Republicans fail to do arithmetically, Democrats make up for in a failure to understand scale. One side can't add and subtract, the other has an issue with depth perception; Democrats seems to think the growing mountain of debt is smaller than it actually is.
What's worse, neither side seems to show an inkling of being willing to cooperate with the other. President Obama and John Boehner are the possible exceptions to this rule, but Boehner is an intellectual lightweight who kowtows to his party's extremes, and President Obama vacillates between a pragmatic centrist who wants to do what's best and a man who is rightfully angry at his political opponents and slams them at inopportune times. He seems to be politically bipolar. And those are our best hopes. Eric Cantor and Harry Reid would probably both be willing to determine who will win the political fight with a duel to the death a la Hamilton and Burr. Certainly neither of them wants to compromise. Democrats won't even pass a budget and Republicans keep passing ones they know Democrats will reject outright. It wouldn't take much for one side to make even a little bit of an effort. Democrats could try doing SOMETHING, and Republicans could try doing something that wasn't deliberately designed to provoke Democrats. Wishful thinking I know, but it doesn't seem like too much to ask for these people to do their jobs, does it?
The American government has shown us time and time again that it is incapable of desperately needed action. Right now we are in such dire straits that the problems we are trying to solve are self-created dilemmas designed to force us to make tough decisions. We can't even do that! It is truly an embarrassment. I'm almost at a loss for what to keep blogging about. Everyone I talk to even if their political beliefs differ from mine agree that our government is where action goes to die. Everyone is disgusted, and almost everyone acknowledges that there is a center path that combines responsible tax hikes with sensible spending cuts. If everyone I talk to knows this, how do the people we voted for not understand it? I really don't know what else to say.
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