Both political parties are crowing this morning about how they won the debt showdown. In reality, they both did. The real losers are the American people and future American genreations.
This is the fun stuff about politics. Basically our politicians are being forced to do something they don’t want to do, and our job is to cut through the obfuscation to uncover the fact that they are doing exactly the opposite of what they say they’re doing.
It is fairly obvious that despite what they are saying publicly, they aren’t making significant cuts to the budget. And S&P and Moody’s know this. Which means that we’ll see our gilt-edged credit rating (a curious term since there is nothing really golden about our national debt) be cut anyway.
There is nothing being cut here. What is happening is that the automatic growth of some spending in our “baseline accounting” method is being reduced. But understand we (The United States of America) will still be spending a great deal more money next year than this year.
We were scammed by both parties with the exception of the tea party members, those “terrorists” as Joe Biden calls them.
What do we have so far?
$917 billion in cuts over 10 years. 2012 spending is capped at $1.043 trillion, $44 billion, or 4.2%, below the CBO March baseline of $1.087 trillion. 2013 spending is capped at $1.047 trillion, $62 billion, or 5.6% below the CBO March baseline of $1.109 trillion.
Then there is this bipartisan committee of politicians who will wrangle over how to cut another $1.5 trillion. If they can’t agree by January 1, 2013, cuts will be automatic across the board, one-half from defense and one-half from discretionary spending. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid won’t be cut. The debt limit would be increased dollar-for-dollar by the amount of the cuts.
So the ruling elite get more of the taxpayers money to spend. What do the American people get.
The shaft!
They promise to have a vote on a balanced budget amendment by year-end.
Will the Bush tax cuts be allowed to expire? Yes, at least that is what Obama says will happen. I believe him.
Obama in a speech this morning laid out his “vision” of more “investments” (read a lot more spending on things other then job creation) to help our economy. I think his “investments” have just about bankrupted us. And I worry for my teen-age daughters’ future. Greece can happen here and in fact I think it already is.
All I can hope for is that we can elect more “terrorists” tea party people to defeat the grandiose plans of the Washington D.C. ruling elite. Republicans and Democrats alike.