Paul Revere is in his 20s, and is concerned about the impact of the growing national debt on his generation. Not much younger than when his namesake made his historic ride, he works in the wake of a tea party to challenge his fellow countrymen to find the courage to act now.
The other day I wrote a post for Race42012 decrying the cowardice of some Republicans in the House of Representatives. Rather than hold to the promise of $100 billion in spending cuts and the promise to bring non-defense discretionary spending down to 2008 levels, scores of Republicans voted with the Democrats to keep $22 billion in funding.
There are too many things wrong with this, from the dollar amount to the breaking of the Pledge to the indication of a lack of budget seriousness among House Republicans, to even scratch the surface of all of them. I’d like to focus instead on the major problem with this new development: that the second bad week in a row for young Americans indicates that the American Dream really is gone for us.
I know, I know. It’s apocalyptic. Yet if Republicans can’t even get to $100 billion now, how can we trust them to tackle entitlements and defense (including spending on Iraq and Afghanistan), over 2/3 of the President’s proposed FY2012 budget? How can we expect them to substantially reduce the approximately 1/6 of American workers who work for the government, and thus do not expand the size of the economic pie nor expand the size of the tax base? How can we expect them to substantially improve our tax code via a Flat Tax or Fair Tax, neither which is perfect but (to quote Charles Krauthammer, who was talking about corporate tax reform, but it applies here as well) “[e]liminate the loopholes to broaden the tax base, then lower the rates for everyone, promoting both fairness and economic efficiency[?]“ Finally, other than a few senators (Rand Paul, Tom Coburn, Pat Toomey and Jim DeMint) and a few Congressman (Ron Paul, Paul Broun, some of the freshman and a few others), how can we count on Republicans to hold the line on the debt ceiling and put America on a path to a balanced budget?
The simple fact is that we clearly can’t assume any of the above necessary changes are going to happen. I hate to say it, but pretty soon we’re going to find out just how different Americans are from the Greeks, British and French— will we continue to put faith in politicians who clearly have no will to do what’s good for the country; will we vote for better politicians and try to wipe the slate as clean as possible while working within the rules of the current American political system; or will we have a rebellion that reboots the entire system?
I hope #2 is a viable option, but with the President’s budget aiming to put $130,000 of debt on the shoulders of each American worker by 2021 (with rosy assumptions, according to some), and Republicans continuing to balk at the lowest-hanging fruit…yeah, we’re definitely going to find out how much Americans really want the American Dream to live on.
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