I don't know who to credit but somebody said that the opposite of PROgress is CONgress. How can so many individually accomplished people become such a collective failure? Forget that it took months to even try to make a deal on the fiscal cliff but the deal they worked out did very little. And as usual the unintended consequences of trying to protect the middle class from tax increases did exactly the opposite. Taxes on everyone who actually pays taxes went up.
No, tax rates were "reduced" back to the previous Bush rates that expired. Now everyone is a tax cutter. Vote for me! I cut your taxes!
But look at your next paycheck and tell me what you see. Payroll taxes are back. And look at your brokerage statements. Investment taxes are up for many (not all). And don't forget not to die because that rate went up too.
This takes hypocrisy a whole new level.
Lewis Black once said,
"The only thing dumber than a Democrat or a Republican is when those pricks work together. You see, in our two-party system, the Democrats are the party of no ideas and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas."I disagree. It is Democrats with bad ideas and Republicans with no ideas.
We are in deep doo-doo and congress does not have the incentive to fix it. Patch it, yes (vote for me!) but fixing it means saying "no" to people. We need the fiscal cliff. We need China to stop buying our bonds. We need an oil shock. We need a food crisis. We need the economy to tank.
Yes, we need any or all of those things. Yes, they will be painful. But the only way an economy can heal itself is to go through the steps and the longer we put it off the worse it will be. Government cannot heal an economy. Government only gets in the way like bad medicine with killer side effects. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.
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