Danger: fiscal cliff ahead
By John Long
Imagine you have a neighbor who one day pays you a call. He’s in trouble, he confides nervously. He makes a good paycheck, but his multiple mortgages and credit card statements are all past due. For years he’s accumulated personal loans and borrowed from loan sharks and lost repeatedly to bookies. He is, in short, swimming in debt. For the moment, he’s handling it all, but he’s afraid down the road a catastrophe awaits. What should he do, he asks?
Long is a Roanoke Times columnist and director of the Salem Museum.
December 6, 2012 - 7:56 AM
I think that there are plenty of “grown-ups enough left in the electorate to accept the painful level of spending cuts that will” not affect them. That is widely proven. What I despair is whether there are enough honest people willing to forgo their partisan blinders long enough to tell the truth that will be required to avert the disaster. I see no evidence here.
Tax hikes will not avert the disaster (if one considers it a disaster at all, but that is a different issue). At best, they will delay the disaster, while making it worse. A band-aid, in other words, when what is needed is surgery. Or amputation.
Elections have consequences…
Amen John Long. You make the point that both increases in revenue coupled with lessened spending is the only real solution to this problem and responses her tell you which party truly views this problem realistically. The debacle that is the US economy is not something we can tax or borrow our way out of. Nor can we realistically cut enough from the budget to accomplish what is needed. BOTH sides need to face this. Republicans have to realize that the level of cuts required to do it with cuts alone is not possible. Democrats need to realize that new laws and new taxes are also not the panacea to our problems. Compromise, actual, real old-fashioned compromise, where both sides give a little is what is needed. Oh, and before the litany of cries about Republican obstructionism come, thinking Republicans should just do everything the democrats want because Obama won the election is not compromise.