Final Thoughts on the Debt Crisis
Now that our country can actually pay the bills that we are obligated to cover, I wanted to throw out a few final thoughts because this has bothered me more than anything since the Iraq War. My biggest concern is the amount of misinformation that informed the invective around this entirely concocted debacle - much of it helped along by the ignorance of the supposed “Tea Party” caucus. I have yet to hear one of these members of Congress be able to speak intelligently on the issue. So, I have real fears when I think that some of these folks are responsible for making major decisions regarding the running of the country and the direction of our collective future. It true - we voted them in. But I hope we’ll just as enthusiastically vote them out…
Despite that, I’m sensitive to their ideological position: we have too much debt and as a nation we are overextended in our obligations. But the way in which we handled the situation with this near-default only weakens us and likely sends us into another stage of recession. But enough on all this. I did find a couple of other articles that I found of interest during the ‘debate’ and I list them here:
Fiddling While Rome Burns and
Wake up GOP: Smashing system doesn’t fix it
Oh, and you might be interested on this quiz to examine your knowledge of the debt.
Don’t get me wrong - the Democrats didn’t have the right of it here. Our entire representative government failed us - but the folks who couldn’t compromise and held to positions based on ignorance pushed the gridlock into crisis. Compromise is the only way to work through large issues in a representative democracy - everyone gets an opinion. Is it the most direct way to address an issue? Hardly ever. But its the only way to make sure everyone gets a say. Even the Tea Party Caucus should have a say; but they should not have been able to hold the entire country hostage.
In the end the US has to pay its bills. We incurred the debt, and now we have to pay it off. Its tough - there’s no good solution and everyone is going to lose. But this has to be done through thoughtful budgeting. That’s the place for this discourse. In the end this debt-ceiling debate wasn’t about the debt - we already have the debt, and we have to pay it - this brinkmanship should have happened during the budget process and not cast the credit-worthiness of the country into debate. We’re all going to suffer from an effective tax of higher interest rates when the economy heads south again. Perhaps we should that the Tea Party for raising our taxes : )
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