Did anyone quietly notice what quietly happened the other day in the U.S. Senate? The same Senate where Democrats have nearly a super-majority in numbers?
They voted down a spending bill. An unpaid-for, 100% borrowed spending bill. And not some Senator's pet bridge to certain reelection. Nope. A bill that extended soon to expire tax cuts and unemployment benefits.
In an election year.
That bill should have been safe as Derek Jeter making the All-Star game.
It went down. Decisively. Because something like 10 or so centrist Dems were opposed to the fact that it was going to add something like another $80 billion to the debt or so.
That was money in voters' pockets, as I said, no public works project of some local and questionable value. It was cash. Borrowed from the Chinese to be sure, but cash.
If that vote occurred expressly because this is an election year, then maybe there is hope that the great and broad public concern about all our governmental red ink is finally beginning to resonate, and sink in, and affect the voting of our elected representatives.
Obama, for all his Harvard Law smarts, doesn't get it still - that some of the greatest dissatisfaction with George W. Bush was not his flouting of the rule of law or the Constitution, though flout he did, but his determination to not pay for anything while cutting taxes to the bone, especially for those who are in the higher income brackets, or make a lot of their money from investments.
It's true enough that we hated things like "Black sites" and "rendition", and firings of U.S. Attorneys for what looked suspiciously like political reasons. We didn't like the many outtakes and malappropisms. There was a feeling like we were collectively less smart with W in charge. But what galled so many in the all-important political center was George W. Bush taking us from a total national debt of $3.5 trillion at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency - the last 2 budgets of which actually paid down the principle of our debt with budget surpluses of around $200 billion per year - to a whopping $11 trillion, with annual deficits as far as the eye could see.
Well, the Obama White House projections are for about $1 trillion dollar deficits for each of the next 10 years. If he does that, he easily eclipses W and becomes the greatest debtor president of all time. Right now it's W. In percentage terms, it's Reagan (he tripled the debt). The thought that this White House is actually prepared to leave $22 trillion in debt to future presidents and generations is mindboggling.
And he made it clear he was ready and waiting to sign the legislation once it passed. But, alas, he did not get the opportunity.
There may finally be a groundwell in America to pay for things and stop borrowing. It's plain to see that while that's some of the change Obama campaigned on, that the source of that change will be coming from elsewhere, maybe, even from our elected representatives, through us, the way it's supposed to work.
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