Is Congress at a stand-still? If so, is that good or bad?
Americans elect representatives whose views, they believe, are best for our country and our people. Since Americans disagree about these things, there will be disagreements, conflicts and even stalemates in Congress.
Our nation’s founders wanted to ensure that extreme legislation, violating their principles, customs, and beliefs, is not imposed on the American people. So, the founders created a system which typically forces compromise to ensure that legislation is acceptable to most Americans.
When one party so dominates the legislature that opposing views can be ignored, extreme legislation can be passed against the wishes of vast numbers of Americans. An example is the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). About 300 Democrat legislators passed Obamacare despite the strong objections of about 200 million Americans and even its overwhelming rejection by the people of Massachusetts.
But, neither one party rule nor compromise is always right. Politicians found they get votes easier by promising free stuff than by legislating responsibly. So most compromises are between representatives who want to overspend and representatives who want to greatly overspend. As a result our $15 trillion debt is growing daily by about $5 billion. Our country is rapidly approaching the level of indebtedness from which few nations have survived and none has been spared major upheaval and pain for its middle and lower income citizens.
The only real question now is which dollar of deficit spending will cause the financial disaster that will dwarf all others? Our credit rating has already been downgraded. Current deficit spending promises further downgrades which will drive up interest rates. Higher interest rates will force some or all of the following: more debt (putting us in a death spiral); significantly higher taxes (killing our economy); severe cutbacks to social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs; hyper inflation that wipes out people’s lifetime savings and destroys our standard of living. Only the rich will avoid the severe pain of this disaster.
Continued deficit spending guarantees disaster for our country and most Americans. The only way to avoid disaster is to seriously start eliminating the deficit and paying down our national debt. Lets start by eliminating hundreds of billions spent on duplicate, wasteful, fraud inducing, inappropriate, failing, counter-productive, and non-essential programs.
President Obama and this Congress are recklessly spending our country to financial disaster. Until enough responsible republicans and democrats are elected to eliminate the deficit and cut the debt, we should encourage, applaud, and support those Senators and Congressmen who bring Congress to a stand-still to stop the spending that further jeopardizes our country’s and our people’s futures.
