Tag Archives: congress

The abyss…

Posted on by

With 24 days left for POTUS and the collective membership United States Congress to start acting like statesmen instead of maladjusted teenagers, it seems like as good a time as any to ponder what falling off the edge of the fiscal cliff might actually look like. Spending would continue to increase more or less unchecked. Taxes would increase across the board. The national credit rating would plummet. The defense budget would get gutted right along with a host of domestic programs that up until now were considered too important to do without. Those are some of the big ticket, first order effects. I’m not sure I even want to speculate about what the 3rd and 4th order effects would entail. I’m not confident that any economist in the country legitimately knows what the end result of fiscal cliff diving would be. Most seem to agree, though, that it would result in a situation that is less than good.

Thoughtful people can honestly disagree about good policy and the right course of action, but intuitively I can’t believe that higher taxes are the solution. Because I’m OCD about certain things, I have a spreadsheet that keeps track of my income, taxes, and other deductions going back a decade. Without getting into detail, trust me when I tell you that Caesar is getting his fair share from me. The Imperial Governor of Maryland is getting his pound of flesh too, even though he insists that I’m rich and should be happy to pay even more. St. Mary’s County, the City of Memphis, and Shelby County are all still getting a nice healthy check every year. Every time I turn around, it seems some taxing authority is digging their hand just a little deeper into my pocket… and if I don’t smile and thank them for it, I’m labeled a racist, a bad citizen, greedy, or heartless. Occasionally, I’ve been called all of them at once.

Like it or not, believe it or not, it’s going to be people like me (and most of you reading this), who end up paying the bill because our elected leaders want to play chicken with a trillion dollar economy. No matter what they tell you now, it’s our taxes – local, state, and federal –are going to go up. We’re the ones who are going to lose our jobs, some for the second and third time in a decade. We’re the ones who should be most outraged by the personal damage being inflicted on us and the inestimable damage being inflicted on the country… but hey, it’s Christmas time, and we wouldn’t want to let a calamity of historic proportions get in the way of our national shopping spree.

If we get to the 1st of the year and don’t see fewer dollars in our paychecks, if we don’t see massive cuts to important programs, if we don’t see an economy tipped back into the abyss, I’ll happily apologize and publicly eat my words right here in my own house. I’m just a guy sitting here paying attention and I hope beyond hope that I’m reading the tealeaves wrong… but I don’t think I am. And I think the worst is yet to come.

State of the Union…

Posted on by

In the strictest possible sense, the state of the Union, is peachy. It’s not like we have states threatening to join up with Canada or Mexico or anything. We’re in the middle of a presidential election cycle where if the incumbent is turned out of office we’ll most likely see yet another peaceful transition of executive authority. Considering world demographics, even the least among us is doing better than the large majority of everyone else on the planet. We survived our capital city being sacked. We survived a brutal civil war and then fought in the war to end all wars before getting pulled into the war after that. In between these wars, we survived finical panics and Great Depressions, pestilence, and famine. Despite it all, we’re still here and managed to cure contagious diseases, send a man to the moon, and connect the world with nothing more than electrons. Keep in mind, we did all those things in our free time when we weren’t occupied dealing with the big stuff. That’s my big picture thinking about the state of the Union, anyway.

If you distill the state of the Union down to the question of whether you’re better off now than you were four years ago, the response probably isn’t as positive. There are plenty of people who can’t find work, can’t buy or sell a house, and at best have spent the last four or five years treading water at best and being pulled under at worst. It’s not an easy time for America and it’s not an easy time to be American. It’s easy to be an optimist when Wall Street only goes higher and unemployment runs at 3%. It’s a hell of a lot harder to be an optimist when you can’t find a job or you’re going to bed hungry at night.

So, you ask, what’s really the state of the Union? Well, it’s probably somewhere between the two extremes. That’s where reality tends to live. It’s neither as strong nor as weak as the pundits and politicos make it out to be. The United States, warts and all, is still the shining example of how to be a republic. Local, State, and Federal governments fight one another. Political parties fight with everyone. Even the separate branches of the same government are locked in Byzantine conflict. Somehow we muddle through without veering too far left or too far right. Dysfunctional as it is, the process is still a wonder to behold. With financial crisis spreading through Europe, our lifeblood oil flowing from the Middle East, and the supply chain for our consumer goods that stretches all over Asia, we Americans are once again learning that we have to engage with the world – the whole world. The future, and a far stronger Union, lie in the direction of cooperation, consensus, and international competition. It’s a hard lesson, but one well worth learning.

Blackout…

Posted on by

As a general rule, I’m not a joiner. I don’t show up at protests and I don’t use my blog as a forum for anyone’s opinions other than mine. Today is an exception. S. 968 – The Protect IP Act is bad public policy and amounts to nothing short of censorship on a scale this country has never seen. Essentially, this Act would grant the government a nearly unfettered ability to order private companies and individuals to remove content, hide content from search engines, and generally make it impossible to continue using the internet as a means of freely exchanging ideas that it has been since its inception. The theft of intellectual property is absolutely wrong and should be prosecuted. Allowing blanket censorship of the internet, however, is like using a nuclear bomb to shoo a fly.

I urge everyone reading this to contact your Members of Congress and tell them that a free and open internent is in the national interest and that they should oppose efforts to censor what we can and cannot see online.

Playing the numbers…

Posted on by

With the collapse of deficit reduction “supercommittee”, once again the inestimable Congress of the United States has failed to do, well, anything at all. Since their collective approval rating hovers around 9%, you’d think that almost every member of the House and 1/3 of the members of the Senate would be looking for work after the next election. The fact is that over the last twenty years, House members seeking reelection are victorious well over 90% of the time. For their re-electable colleagues in the Senate, that number is closer to 80%. Still better odds than you’ll ever get in Vegas (unless you’re the house, of course). Using some roughly accurate statistics, that’s a long way of saying that unless something dramatic changes between now and the election, the Congress we have now is largely going to be the Congress we have after the election. If that doesn’t make you queasy, you’re probably not paying much attention.

Partisans on the left and the right will tell you that this is the perfect reason we need term limits imposed on elected officials. I submit that it’s not so much an issue of term limits being needed as it is a clear message about how engaged electorate is. Cycle after cycle, a small percentage of eligible voters go to the polls and select the guy whose name they’ve heard before, or the one who has the prettiest yard signs, or the one who had the nicest looking piece of direct mail. In doing that, the voters just don’t stop to ask if their particular senator or representative is part of the problem. If that person is currently serving, here’s a hint: He or she is the problem and needs to be replaced. Two years from now, if that new individual has become part of the problem, they need to be replaced. And again until voters stumble on someone responsive to the needs of the country and who’s putting national priorities above regional benefits or party politics.

Until that happens, we’re going to continue to get the kind of government we deserve. That is to say a government that is hopelessly dysfunctional. Elections are won based on who shows up. If all most people do is bitch and complain and let the same 20% who always show up to vote have their way, well, we’ll get the same level dysfunction we’ve all come to know and loathe. If you’re pissed off, if you want something different then it’s on you to get educated, make smart decisions, and actually go to your polling place. If you can’t be bothered to do even that much, then you’re a bigger part of the problem then the asshats we keep electing.

New Deal Revisited…

Posted on by

A member of Congress with a famous family name is proposing a simple solution to the bringing down the unemployment rate: Put approximately 15 million people on the federal payroll with a $40,000 a year salary. The proposal would revive concepts that saw a Civilian Conservation Corps plant trees, build dams, and forge roads and a Works Progress Administration that built airports and paid authors and photographers to ply their trade on behalf of the US Government. As fanatical as I am about the proper role of government, even I have to admit that the CCC and WPA probably represent the best instincts of government. Maybe I have a soft spot for the concept because I grew up swimming and camping at a place built by the CCC in the late 30s. Say what you will about it having been a “make work” project, but their efforts have held up pretty well under 80 years of continual use.

Maybe more importantly, the CCC and WPA made constructive work part of the requirement to receive federal assistance. In the 30s, your options were pretty much work or starve. I wonder, though, if those concepts would still hold up. How many people receiving federal assistance would be willing to go to work camps in the wilderness, to sweep their cities streets, or to lift a hand to earn what we now think of as entitlements? As a result of their experiences during the Depression, my grandfather saved soap slivers that he eventually pressed together into a new bar and my grandmother used the same teabag for cup after cup of tea despite the need for them to do these things being long past. When’s the last time any of us even thought about doing something like that?

I never in my life thought I could be convinced to line up with Representative Jesse Jackson Jr on an issue, but I think this one at least has academic merit. I don’t necessarily agree with all his reasoning or the total numbers he’s talking about, but I have to admit I really like the concept. Let’s face it, we’re going to pay unemployment, welfare, and a raft of other “entitlements” anyway, so why not make productivity a requirement for receiving unemployment and other funds from the government?

This is probably the point where someone is going to come to my door to collect my Republican Party membership card.

Shame…

Posted on by

Last night, a member of the United States Congress stood in front of a campaign fundraiser in New York City and told the crowd that “The country is ripe for a true revolution.” Worse yet, he had the unmitigated gall to use this call to revolt as nothing more than an applause line. I suggest you study your history, Mr. Paul. Revolutions are brutal affairs. Look to our own Civil War and War for Independence as your examples. Look to France’s Reign of Terror as a guide if the fields of Antietam, Shiloh, Lexington, and Bunker Hill aren’t bloody enough for you.

Words, Congressman Paul, are important. How we use them is important. The meaning we convey, whether intentionally provoking or simply aimed at garnering easy applause, is important. And by God, sir, when you as use your status as a duly elected member of Congress to call for revolution against the government of the United States, you’ve saved us all the trouble of deciding and branded yourself a traitor.

We had our revolution, Congressman, and with it we secured the right to replace our government through legal means. As a twice failed candidate for president, you’ve not garnered the support of enough of your own party to even be the nominee, let alone convince half the electorate at large that your ideas are right. No sir, we don’t need a revolution. What we do need is to get back to the spirit and intent of the revolution we fought to win our independence. I’ve been a capital “R” Republican for most of my adult life, but I’ve been a lowercase “r” republican for much longer. The founders gave us all the tools we need cure what ails this nation. We must fix the foundation, but you want to tear down the whole house and then set the rubble alight. You may couch your rhetoric in populism, but a call to revolution, intentional or otherwise, is a supreme act of cowardice from a man who’s run out of legitimate ideas. Shame! Shame!

Default and disfunction…

Posted on by

Watching the nightly news or reading the newspaper headlines is something of a lesson in dysfunction. If the two major political parties that have run the country for the last 100 odd years can’t come to grips with the fact that the thought of the US Government defaulting on its debt should be unthinkable, perhaps it’s time to consider the value of having either of those parties around. The men who founded this republic literally risked their lives just by signing a document proclaiming themselves free from Great Britain. Today’s politicians, both Republican and Democrat, are so entrenched in ideology and in playing to their base that they seem willing to let the ship of state sink with all flags flying and their hands around each other’s throat. So much for heroics. So much for for their obligation to the republic they were elected to serve.

I’m not a mathematician, but the formula seems obvious. For the staggering debt this country labors under to come down, spending must decrease and revenue must increase. Yes, some social programs will go away and that will hurt some people. Yes, some taxes will go up and that will hurt some people also. It’s going to be painful for many of us to adjust to a world more austere than then one we think we’re entitled to. It was painful for our grandparents, too, when they went though the “economic adjustment” of the Great Depression, but they emerged from it and worse to be recognized as our greatest generation.

Where are our great leaders today? Where’s our FDR with his Hundred Days? Where’s this generation’s Reagan standing toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union? Where’s our Kennedy calling on men to reach the moon? Where’s our Nixon opening China? Maybe such men don’t even exist anymore. Today’s politicians aren’t fit to carry the water for those giants of the 20th century and shouldn’t be in the same history books with the leaders of our distant past like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

This current crisis doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, but only if the men and women we’ve elected start behaving more like statesmen and less like common street thugs. How optimistic are you?

Down to the wire…

Posted on by

Today being the single most non-productive work day in my professional life, I had time to ponder the ineptitude with witch our elected officials are managing the country’s business. As we march on towards midnight on the east coast, a few words come to mind. Among them are pathetic, inexcusable, farcical, shameful, and just plain disgusting. Watching these “representatives” of the people allow the government to slip minute by minute towards shutdown, insolvency, and deadlock should be disheartening to anyone who goes to work every day and is actually expected to get their job done.

A friend posted something on my Facebook wall this morning, that I think sums it up better than I can at the moment: “Other countries may have coups, revolutions, and collapses, but a government so deadlocked it simply ceases to function seems to be an exclusively American phenomenon.” The quote is attributed to Foreign Policy, and it should be plastered on all of our minds the next time we head to the polls. That the government of our republic can be thrown into this kind of turmoil by congressional inability to accomplish one of the few tasks specifically assigned to it by the Constitution would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

I’m embarrassed for them… and for us.

Plan? What plan?

Posted on by

I’ve seen some jacked up things in my time with Uncle Sam, but nothing in that time even comes close to the inability of senior departmental officials to communicate even the most basic of information to the workforce. The same workforce they’ll be asking in a few hours to execute a currently unknown plan to shut down a very large portion of the department. Surely at this stage there’s a plan, right? I mean it’s been in a file somewhere collecting dust since the early 1980s and occasionally trotted out and updated once or twice a decade since then under circumstances very similar to these. All I’m suggesting is that hows and whats of standing down the department shouldn’t really be a surprise to you at this point.

One of the things they beat into our heads at Army school way back in 2003 was that leadership is mostly about taking care of people. That and not losing too many things. Losing things is considered bad form in a leader and is frowned upon. From what I’ve observed from the belly of the beast over the last four days, not one member of Official Washington has shown anything passing for a shred of leadership ability… or really displayed any redeeming social value whatsoever.

My Mr. Smith moment…

Posted on by

I did something today that I’ve never even given more than a passing thught to doing in the past. I exercised my right to call out, or rather call on, my elected representative to Congress. The nice staffer at Congressman Blackburn’s office was very polite when i explained that I was a registered voter in the Tennessee 7th, a federal employee, and that I’d very much like to go to work on Monday. She assured me that my message would make it to the congressman straight away. Yeah, I’m not sure I bought that part, but someone less jaded would have probably appreciated it as a helpful throwaway statement.

I have no idea what made me think of doing that. It just struck me that some effort needs to be made to keep the scale from being completely filled with the voices of the radicals who want to believe that Jesus hates compromise. We need serious structural changes to how the government does business. What we don’t need is 800,000 more people unemployed on Monday morning because the elected leaders of the United States of America can’t find their honorable asses with both hands and a flashlight.