Fiscal Ruin

First of two postings for this morning...

If I haven't convinced anyone on here to vote for change in this election, perhaps this article will do it.

It isn't a sexy article, it doesn't have the political "pop" of a juicy congressional page scandal nor the heartstrings tugging power of nearly 3000 dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis (most reliable estimates coming in between 200,000 and 650,000). It's even more boring and esoteric than Habeas Corpus or whether "waterboarding" counts as torture.

Nevertheless, it very well could impact every single one of us far more than all of the rest combined: Leading economists, including the head of the Government Accountability Office (the article states this effectively makes him the nation's "accountant-in-chief"), say that the U.S. is on the path to financial collapse and ruin.

Ladies and Gentlemen of my reading audience, this is why we need checks and balances BETWEEN the political parties, and why the current Republican financial policies (which are absolutely not conservative policies) are even worse than the extremely odious Democratic ones. Because while no one likes paying high taxes, "tax and spend" at least holds the distinction of being fiscally responsible when compared to "borrow and spend".

Regardless, I don't like either, but until or unless someone can put forth a plan to honestly curtail spending and reduce the size of government, our best bet is to have the Democratic party have a check on spending on Republican issues and pork and the Republican party have a check on Democratic spending. It's still not perfect, pork barrel politics can still go on, but I'll point again to the administration preceding the current one. A Republican legislative branch, a Democratic executive, together shutting down each other's more extreme spending and only together managing to balance a budget which unified Republican branches have merely looked at as a bar to be cleared with ever higher deficits. I have no doubt that both branches in Democratic hands would raise spending by equivalent amounts, but as we have not had any sustained Democratic party control over both branches of government in years, that's largely theoretical.

Leading economists, the ones who are in the best position to know, say we're heading in the direction of a financial catastrophe. As citizens, we have only one tool which we can use to work on this problem: our votes. Let's use them.

Liam.