Skip to main content

Pay the damned bills!

Nobody can accuse us, here in the U.S., of single-mindedness.  We are about as divided of mind as it is possible to get, short of pure madness.

We call ourselves a two-party system, and we are, sort of.  That is part of the problem.  With only two parties, everything gets reduced to A or B, left or right, tax or spend, right or wrong.  The fact is that nothing is that simple.

Even if it were that simple, we find ourselves with two parties well to the right of center.  Nobody knows where the liberals went.  No!  That is not quite right!  We know where Bernie Sanders of Vermont is, but he doesn't know where all the others went.

It is even more hilarious than that.  (I use "hilarious" because if we cannot laugh at our self-mutilation, we will begin to weep at the injury.)  The Republicans are our conservatives, but they--the conservatives--have been ambushed by the Tea Party, which is so conservative it has trouble taking down the Nazi signs at its street rallies.  They aren't all Nazis!  Hardly any of them are!  But they certainly do make the rest of the Republican Party look like irrelevant, old-fashioned, pay-your-bills politicians.

"Raising the debt limit" simply is an authorization to pay the bills Congress has long-since decided to incur.  It simply means, "Pay our bills!"  We have already borrowed the money, and used it.  Payments are due.  Pay them!  If we don't, all fiscal hell is going to break loose.  It will mean that we promised to pay the bills, and that we aren't going to do it.  Maybe later.  We'll see.

That is why the European Union is bailing out Greece, and Ireland, and maybe Spain and Portugal.  We don't have a European Union to bail us out.  Our credit rating will be ruined, borrowing money will cost more, everybody will be paying more in interest on everything, if the loans can be had.  It is playing chicken with our nation, at blinding speed, on a dark road.  It is Russian roulette with a fully-loaded gun.

The Republican Party has been hi-jacked by ideologues.  Pretending it is "compromise", the Democrats have moved almost all the way over to where the Republicans used to be, and Bernie Sanders is up there in the woods of Vermont, lost, calling "Rachel!" to the trees, and not even hearing an echo.

Pay the damned bills!  Don't cut government spending just now when we need jobs!  Reform the tax code! Invest in roads and bridges and trains and super-high speed-electronic networks!  Reshape our educational system and train engineers, and scientists, and technicians, and mathematicians, and everything we need to become an economic and cultural and political powerhouse, again!


And for God's sake, send those Tea Party people home!  Tell them to go look for Bernie Sanders!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more