Last week I read something in the WSJ that made my head spin.
A bill was voted down in the Senate which would have created a bipartisan commission whose job would be to tackle the enormous budget deficit the United States is currently running. The key words here are bipartisan commission. This article, taken from the Lawrence Journal, sums up a few of the constraints the commission would have had, which would have kept either party from gaining unchecked authority in balancing the US budget.
The failed bill wasn’t a mandate on how to solve the deficit; it was a bill about setting up a framework of discussion for solving the deficit. There’s a difference between the two, and the bill would have allowed many paths to a solution.
The deficit clearly needs to be addressed before the U.S. ends up with a forced fiscal austerity program like Greece. If you want to get a sense for how rapidly our public debt is growing, here’s a website devoted to tallying our nation’s debt: Debt Clock. (Be sure to hit Refresh a couple times to get a sense of the pace.) It’s scary and breathtaking.
Anyway, back to the bill voted down in the Senate. Apparently, six Senators co-sponsored the writing of the bill, put their name on the bill, and then voted “No” during the roll-call. It might help to repeat the sentence a few times to appreciate the full effect. The behavior of our elected officials is quite discouraging. How can anyone justify even one second of the time these six Senators spent working on this bill, only to vote against it during the roll call? What is the point? I don’t think there is an easy answer to the deficit problem, but it doesn’t seem like voting against your own bill is part of the solution!
To solve a problem, it seems necessary to first identify the problem’s cause. If your books are deeply in the red, you must either cut costs, sell assets, or raise revenues. None of the options is an easy way out; eventually, somebody will have to foot the bill. It’s not going to be a pleasant process for anybody, but maybe things would be more efficient if our government learned to collaborate a little more effectively.
