COLUMN: Happy Birthday America, now grow up
July 04, 2010 8:28 AM
Buzz Livingston
?We?re all in this together? ? Dread Clampitt, ?Sisters and Brothers?
A national holiday should bring us together but today, in America, fingers are always pointed at each other. People are carrying signs mostly saying ?Hooray for our Side.? Instead of coming up with solutions, politicians are just making crazy sounds.
We have a budgetary crisis unlike any our nation has faced. Both sides of the political spectrum are wrong unless they are willing to compromise. This entire weekend speakers across the nation will intone and imagine what our Founding Fathers would want. When the Constitution was drafted (which had nothing to do with 4 July) our Founding Fathers knew that if their experiment was to work, compromise was essential. Heck, the vice president was the white man who finished second.
We have a gargantuan national debt. If you want to blame someone else for it, remember that when you point your finger, three more are aiming back at you. Thanks to bailouts, wars and ambitious social programs our nation?s debt is 89 percent of Gross Domestic Product and climbing. Conservatives look at tax increases as work of the devil while liberals look at any type of spending cut the same way. That is not dramatic over-simplification, and compromises on both sides are essential for our nation to have a sustainable budget.
Currently we are doing nothing and that is unconscionable.
If raising taxes is not an option like some claim, then we must look at meaningful cuts in Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid along with defense and other domestic spending. For instance, without tax increases military spending will have to be sliced from 4.3 percent (2008) to 2.6 percent (2019) for a sustainable budget (Choosing our Nation?s Fiscal Future, www.nap.edu). Domestic spending will go under a sharp knife also with cuts from 6.5 percent (2008) to 4.3 percent (2019). Instead, we see budgetary bogeyman like the Republican ?You Cut? gimmick. Assuming Congress enacts every cut proposed, the deficit would shrink a whopping .017 percent.
An alternative to draconian cuts would be compromise. That is precisely what conservative icon Ronald Reagan did during his first term. After lowering taxes early in his administration, Reagan later boosted Social Security levies. Heck, there was a temporary surcharge on estate taxes during his watch.
Since we are looking at Social Security, it could be ?saved? without directly raising the Social Security tax rate. Briefly, we could solve Social Security?s woes by gradually increasing the retirement age to 68 (by 2050), calculating benefits for upper wage earners less generously, and using a more toned down inflation adjustment.
However, liberals use scare tactics to demonize any changes in Social Security entitlements. Yes, Virginia those are entitlements, get over it. No, most people cannot do better investing themselves so conservatives should drop the baloney about privatizing Social Security. Stop babbling about I.O.U.s in the Social Security trust fund ? those government bonds are supposed to be there. Insurance companies buy U.S. Treasury bonds all the time for beneficiaries and annuitants.
The bottom-line is that Americans want it all, we want it now and we want someone else to pay for it. Unless we remember how to compromise, we are heading down a long stretch of bad dirt road.
On July 4 at 7 p.m., Dread Clampitt will be playing at Seaside. Get their new CD; you will be glad you did. Next week when you listen to ?Brothers and Sisters,? remember we are all in this together.
July 04, 2010 8:28 AM
Buzz Livingston
?We?re all in this together? ? Dread Clampitt, ?Sisters and Brothers?
A national holiday should bring us together but today, in America, fingers are always pointed at each other. People are carrying signs mostly saying ?Hooray for our Side.? Instead of coming up with solutions, politicians are just making crazy sounds.
We have a budgetary crisis unlike any our nation has faced. Both sides of the political spectrum are wrong unless they are willing to compromise. This entire weekend speakers across the nation will intone and imagine what our Founding Fathers would want. When the Constitution was drafted (which had nothing to do with 4 July) our Founding Fathers knew that if their experiment was to work, compromise was essential. Heck, the vice president was the white man who finished second.
We have a gargantuan national debt. If you want to blame someone else for it, remember that when you point your finger, three more are aiming back at you. Thanks to bailouts, wars and ambitious social programs our nation?s debt is 89 percent of Gross Domestic Product and climbing. Conservatives look at tax increases as work of the devil while liberals look at any type of spending cut the same way. That is not dramatic over-simplification, and compromises on both sides are essential for our nation to have a sustainable budget.
Currently we are doing nothing and that is unconscionable.
If raising taxes is not an option like some claim, then we must look at meaningful cuts in Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid along with defense and other domestic spending. For instance, without tax increases military spending will have to be sliced from 4.3 percent (2008) to 2.6 percent (2019) for a sustainable budget (Choosing our Nation?s Fiscal Future, www.nap.edu). Domestic spending will go under a sharp knife also with cuts from 6.5 percent (2008) to 4.3 percent (2019). Instead, we see budgetary bogeyman like the Republican ?You Cut? gimmick. Assuming Congress enacts every cut proposed, the deficit would shrink a whopping .017 percent.
An alternative to draconian cuts would be compromise. That is precisely what conservative icon Ronald Reagan did during his first term. After lowering taxes early in his administration, Reagan later boosted Social Security levies. Heck, there was a temporary surcharge on estate taxes during his watch.
Since we are looking at Social Security, it could be ?saved? without directly raising the Social Security tax rate. Briefly, we could solve Social Security?s woes by gradually increasing the retirement age to 68 (by 2050), calculating benefits for upper wage earners less generously, and using a more toned down inflation adjustment.
However, liberals use scare tactics to demonize any changes in Social Security entitlements. Yes, Virginia those are entitlements, get over it. No, most people cannot do better investing themselves so conservatives should drop the baloney about privatizing Social Security. Stop babbling about I.O.U.s in the Social Security trust fund ? those government bonds are supposed to be there. Insurance companies buy U.S. Treasury bonds all the time for beneficiaries and annuitants.
The bottom-line is that Americans want it all, we want it now and we want someone else to pay for it. Unless we remember how to compromise, we are heading down a long stretch of bad dirt road.
On July 4 at 7 p.m., Dread Clampitt will be playing at Seaside. Get their new CD; you will be glad you did. Next week when you listen to ?Brothers and Sisters,? remember we are all in this together.
