Out of the Woods

The fiscal crisis

 No doubt the fiscal problem has its complexities, but in outline it is a very simple problem. Two sorts of people are holding up some sort of compromise. There are, on the one hand, the people who want to get rid of Obama's healthcare reform. On the other side are people who think we are spending too much money.

As to "Obama care." I don't think it is a very good law either. By getting private insurance companies involved, a whole lot of public money goes to enrich the insurance companies and we know them to be notoriously shameless. They'll cheat their customers in any way to make a buck. The government should not be supporting that.

But I do not think that if Obama care becomes a functional system the country is going to collapse completely. Leaving Obama care in place does not amount to Armageddon. Having the federal government default on its debts comes pretty close to that. Obamacare is not as serious a threat to our national well-being than a debt default—regardless of what Ted Cruz says.

The opponents of Obama care, blinded by their ( often racist ) hatred of Obama are about to do serious damage to all of us. What are they thinking?

The elected representatives worried about our economy, should worry about what will happen to the economy if the debt limit is not raised.

To be sure we are spending more money than he should. I have made some suggestions about that in a previous blog.

The Pentagon spends half $1 trillion a year. How much money goes to the surveillance of American citizens by the NSA? How much to all sorts of secret missions planned and executed by the CIA?

Cutting those military and quasi-military programs would be a much more intelligent way of reducing our governments expenditures than having the government go bankrupt. That would do major damage to the American and the world economy from which we would not recover for a long time.

Neither of these opponents of a sensible settlement of the fiscal crisis are thinking straight. Woe to us if our representatives do not stop being wildly irrational!