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I’ve heard quite a few descriptions of the current debt ceiling debate lately, using the old teenage dependent’s credit card analogy. That analogy is not a bad one, I reckon, but it needs a little tweaking … in my opinion.
The analogy goes like this:
The Dhimmicrat Congress, having reached the legal limit of it’s spending capabilities and demanding a raise of the debt ceiling is like your teenage son maxxing out the credit card you gave him and now is asking for an increase in his credit limit. Since you’ve raised the limit so many times and he’s maxxed it each and every time, you’re getting a little peeved that he can’t grasp the concept of limiting his purchases.
That’s purdy close, but there’s more to it…
Your son didn’t just charge up the card, he also managed to talk several of your neighbors into loaning him even more money to blow – more money than you will earn in a lifetime. And he fully expects to pay back those loans with his credit card.
Those neighbors that he owes money to; hey hate your guts.
Your son has been boarding outlaws and hoodlums in your basement. He’s feeding them, clothing them and providing them entertainment, drugs and hookers. He’s using your money to support these people, in your own home, and they also hate your guts.
Your son has been buying expensive, custom-built guns and giving them to another set of your neighbors. These particular neighbors hate your guts also, and have actually assaulted you personally in the past on multiple occasions. Now they have some really cool weaponry to use on you – that you paid for.
Your son has hired someone to control what you can and cannot eat.
Your son has hired someone to control what you drive.
Your son has hired someone to control what you listen to on the radio.
Your son has hired someone to steal all your personal guns.
Your son has hired someone to control all those other controllers.
And each and every one of those controllers hate your guts.
Your son is now demanding that if you can’t afford extra credit card payments that you get another job. Although your son has never had a job of his own and can’t even spell the word, he’s convinced that by spending more of your money he can create some jobs for you. You will be able to work for him. He’ll pay you with your own money so you can afford to raise his credit card limit. And just to make sure that plan works smoothly he’s also subsidizing a union for you to join as his employee. The union will make sure your son treats you right because you’re paying them too. And of course, they’re giving some of that money to your son for landing them the contract.
You are getting ready to kick the living crap out of your son.
There. That’s a fine tuned analogy for ya…
Update: Your job description as your son’s employee is to think up new innovative ways your son can swindle you.
Rather than going from the sublime to the ridiculous… we are now going the other way to here what Thomas Sowell has to say":
Thomas Sowell
Ideals Versus Realities
Many of us never thought that the Republicans would hold tough long enough to get President Obama and the Democrats to agree to a budget deal that does not include raising income tax rates. But they did -- and Speaker of the House John Boehner no doubt desires much of the credit for that.
Despite the widespread notion that raising tax rates automatically means collecting more revenue for the government, history says otherwise. As far back as the 1920s, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon pointed out that the government received a very similar amount of revenue from high-income earners at low tax rates as it did at tax rates several times as high.
How was that possible? Because high tax rates drive investors into tax shelters, such as tax-exempt bonds. Today, as a result of globalization and electronic transfers of money, "the rich" are even less likely to stand still and be sheared like sheep, when they can easily send their money overseas, to places where tax rates are lower.
Money sent overseas creates jobs overseas -- and American workers cannot transfer themselves overseas to get those jobs as readily as investors can send their money there.
All the overheated political rhetoric about needing to tax "millionaires and billionaires" is not about bringing in more revenue to the government. It is about bringing in more votes for politicians who stir up class warfare with rhetoric.
Now that the Republicans seem to have gotten the Democrats off their higher taxes kick, the question is whether a minority of the House Republicans will refuse to pass the Boehner legislation that could lead to a deal that will spare the country a major economic disruption and spare the Republicans from losing the 2012 elections by being blamed -- rightly or wrongly -- for the disruptions.
Is the Boehner legislation the best legislation possible? Of course not! You don't get your heart's desire when you control only one house of Congress and face a presidential veto.
The most basic fact of life is that we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available. It is not idealism to ignore the limits of one's power. Nor is it selling out one's principles to recognize those limits at a given time and place, and get the best deal possible under those conditions.
That still leaves the option of working toward getting a better deal later, when the odds are more in your favor.
There would not be a United States of America today if George Washington's army had not retreated and retreated and retreated, in the face of an overwhelmingly more powerful British military force bent on annihilating Washington's troops.
Later, when the conditions were right for attack, General Washington attacked. But he would have had nothing to attack with if he had wasted his troops in battles that would have wiped them out.
Similar principles apply in politics. As Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago: "Preserving my principles unshaken, I reserve my activity for rational endeavors."
What does "rational" mean? At its most basic, it means an ability to make a ratio, as with "rational numbers" in mathematics. More broadly, it means an ability to weigh one thing against another.
There are a lot of things to weigh against each other, not only as regards the economy, but also what the consequences to this nation would be to have Barack Obama get re-elected and go further down the dangerous path he has put us on, at home and abroad. Is it worth that risk to make a futile symbolic vote in Congress?
One of the good things about the Tea Party movement is that it resisted the temptation to actually form a third political party, which has been an exercise in futility, time and time again, under the American electoral system.
But, if the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party becomes just a rule-or-ruin minority, then they might just as well have formed a separate third party and gone on to oblivion.
Writers can advocate things that have no chance at the moment, for their very writing about those things persuasively can make them possible at some future date. But to adopt the same approach as an elected member of Congress risks losing both the present and the future.
