Fiscal Cliff Political Snake Oil

It’s not as though our journey to the so-called fiscal cliff was a surprise or accident. This journey was planned, voted and approved by a congress that can’t say NO. And it didn’t start with the Obama administration. It started with the Johnson administration fifty years ago by raiding Social Security to fund new so-called entitlement programs he called The Great Society. It was that short-sightedness and the continued expansion of government overhead since then that has brought us to where we are today.

The fix is simple. Any head of household knows what it is. You don’t spend more than you have. You budget what you do have to last until your next paycheck, or in this case, the next April 15th. Like the game of golf the concept is simple. Hit the ball into the hole. The hard part is gaining the skill to do it.

The administration today champions higher taxes. They like the tax rates under the Clinton administration. They conveniently forget the part where Clinton’s spending didn’t exceed the revenue and how that came to be.

Again, the fix is simple but it requires decisions that are not politically easy to make. Make and pass a budget, something the Obama administration has so-far neglected to do. And make it a revenue-priority budget, not a spending-priority budget. To support a sustainable economy and society, it means when your money runs out on paper, you’ve spent enough. As opposed to borrowing to keep up with your spending and entitlement programs. Or to put it another way, making promises you can’t keep.

Above all else, you don’t grow government. What the politicos in Washington fail to understand is that growing government is increasing our (taxpayers’) overhead. And when you’re going out of business, you don’t increase your overhead. Any politician that suggests anything to the contrary is pushing snake oil.

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