The Bottomless Vortex

OK.  The fairness issues, justified or not, have now been dealt with.  Tax rates on the so-called wealthy have been raised.  Now it is time to finally get serious about the real fiscal cliff issues - government spending.  Unfortunately, calling government spending a fiscal cliff is a serious understatement.  What confronts America is a bottomless fiscal vortex.  Government spending is out of control.  It is way past time to reduce the bloated government beureaucracy, reign in the exponential growth of entitlement programs, and alleviate restraints on private enterprise.

The problem is that Barack Obama has no interest in addressing those issues.  Incomprehensible budget deficits, approaching government insolvency, and the lack of job creating / productivity improving / quality of life enhancing economic expansion does not concern him.  His agenda is to grow government and the government dependent welfare state, with the secondary objective of making Republicans responsible for making the tough but necessary choices Americans won't like.

More evidence of that ideological goal appeared yesterday (January 2, 2013).  After blackmailing Republicans into approving the tax increases while postponing the spending cuts to deal with the 'fiscal cliff', a problem that is overwhelmingly due to Obama's massive expansion of public debt through welfare state spending programs rather than lack of revenues, Obama now says "I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they've already racked up through the laws that they passed."  He is refusing to discuss the debt ceiling issue that must be addressed in February.  Now that is just absolutely unbelievable audacity!

Republicans got suckered again.  They were browbeaten into 'solving' the smoke-screen revenue problem with measures that won't work while punting on the clear and present critical danger of unsustainable government spending.  Democrats always promise to address spending issues as a compromise for raising taxes, then refuse to follow through.  Democrats play politics as a game, destroying the fabric of the country while blaming Republicans for the results.  The game has advanced from "Lie, Cheat and Steal" to "Lie, Cheat, Steal, Destroy and Blame the opposition".  Democrats always win that game.  Regrettably, it is not really a game as future generations of Americans will discover as first their prosperity, then their livelihood and quality of life, and finally their freedom become distant memories.

I can't help but wonder what percentage of political leaders, media network executives and talking heads, Hollywood celebrities, labor union leaders, community organizers and those who make up the constituency of the Democratic Party (women, blacks, Latinos, people under the age of 30) have ever owned a business or taken any courses at all in economics or history, let alone courses beyond economics or history 101.  Do they know anything about macro-economic theory, monetary policy, capital allocation, budgets, or debt?  Have they ever been exposed to the historical record of socialism, communism, autocratic dictatorships and other government controlled societies?  A country is doomed when the people most uneducated in matters determining a society's existence are the ones who choose its equally unknowledgable leaders.  Unfortunately, as the world has shown many times over, a prosperous society starts down the road to ruin when incompetent bullshitters preaching false 'compassion for the people' outmaneuver reality.